Google is getting ready to construct what would be the first subsea fibre optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia.
The information comes as the foremost cloud hyperscalers battle it out for enterprise {dollars}, with Google enjoying catchup with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure.
Notably, Google’s announcement follows widespread outages throughout Japanese Africa, which have been attributed to defective undersea cables. And for an organization that depends on resilient connectivity to ship its companies to customers and companies alike, Google’s clearly attempting to capitalize on this to place itself as the answer.
Dubbed “Umoja,” its new cable begins off in Kenya and run by varied international locations together with Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, earlier than concluding its land journey in South Africa — notably house to Google’s first African knowledge heart areas, which has been operational in Johannesburg for the reason that begin of this yr.
The terrestrial a part of the route is definitely already full, Google confirmed to TechCrunch, which mentioned it labored with an organization referred to as Liquid Clever Applied sciences for that section. Nevertheless, the work on channeling the cable throughout the Indian Ocean to Perth, Australia, is already underway.
“Umoja will enable African countries to more reliably connect with each other and the rest of the world,” Brian Quigley, Google Cloud’s VP for international community infrastructure, mentioned in a weblog publish as we speak. “Establishing a new route distinct from existing connectivity routes is critical to maintaining a resilient network for a region that has historically experienced high-impact outages.”
There are lots of of cables spanning the world’s seas, oceans, and waterways, with Massive Tech together with Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon claiming an more and more greater stake within the infrastructure. The reason being easy: the extra cables and knowledge facilities there are, the higher high quality of service these firms can present their prospects with, be it lower-latency YouTube streams or speedier knowledge transfers for enterprises invested within the cloud.
The present closest subsea cable path to what Google is proposing with Umoja could be the Oman Australia Cable (OAC) that connects Oman with Perth, which opened for enterprise in 2022. And Google itself has already invested in varied cabling tasks centered round Africa, together with Equiano which connects Portugal with Nigeria and South Africa.
Earlier this yr, Google additionally introduced plans to construct what will likely be one of many first subsea cables connecting South America with Asia-Pacific, working from Chile to Australia through French Polynesia.
Whereas Google hasn’t offered a selected timeframe for finishing Umoja, a spokesperson instructed TechCrunch {that a} typical submarine cable construct from planning by to turning into operational is round three years. So we are able to, maybe, count on this cable to be prepared for prime time by round 2026.
