In recent years, the African continent has been on the rise with regard to submarine cables, since recently the commencement of the planning of a new submarine cable called South Atlantic Express (SAEx), which will connect North America, South America, Asia and Africa.
In addition to this cable, Google has now announced the Equiano, a new submarine cable from Portugal to South Africa, which promises to bring super fast Internet to local coasts. The new cable will use a state-of-the-art infrastructure based on space division multiplexing (SDM) technology. The SDM transmits information along parallel channels.
This will be the first undersea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber pair level, rather than the traditional wavelength level switching approach. "This greatly simplifies the allocation of cable capacity, giving Google the flexibility to add and different locations as needed.
O new cable, which will be fully funded by Google, is expected to be operational in South Africa by 2021. A contract to build the cable was signed with the Alcatel Submarine Networks at the end of last year. It is important to note here that South Africa has access to several submarine cables. Along the east coast of Africa, there is the Seacom, built in 2009, and the SAT-3 / SAFE (Far East Cape of South Africa), which is older. O WACS (West Africa Cable System), supported by NTD, was completed in 2012.
