Google's Equiano subsea cable lands in South Africa

The ship the "ILE DE SEIN" is at this moment about 2km offshore from Melkbosstrand. So they are still busy with the landing. I'm wondering if this part, the landing, is just the landing branch to Melkbosstrand from the main Equiano cable. I'm wondering if the main cable has yet arrived in South Africa. The "ILE DE SEIN" arrived in Cape Town yesterday and moved up to Melkbosstrand early this morning. When it came down from Swapkopmund in Namibia it was cruising at 11Knots which, as far as I understand, is too fast to lay cable. Cable is layed at low single digit knots.
 
Ok, after a bit of searching. Apparently the main cable trunk is connected to a buoy called the "Southern trunk tail marker buoy". Thus after the ship is finished in Melkbostrand it will cruise north west to the buoy to do the final splice between the Melkbosstrand branch and the main cable trunk at the buoy.
The main cable was temporarily connected to the buoy in late 2021 and is located roughly 500km west from Saldanha. Follow @philBE2 on Twitter for more info.
 
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Jan said:
Google's massive 144 Tbps undersea cable lands in South Africa

Google has landed its Equiano undersea cable at Telkom’s facility in Melkbosstrand, WIOCC has announced.

WIOCC owns one of Equiano’s 12 terabit-per-second (Tbps) fibre pairs and was Google’s landing partner in Lagos, Nigeria.
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What benefits will this have for me as a consumer? Will this result in lower internet costs? As far as I know we're pretty much close to as good as it gets in terms of latency, so would be nice to save a few bucks on my internet connection.
 
W@P said:
Does anyone remember the anticipation way back when we were waiting for seacom to land?
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Good Lord yes. I remember when all our traffic on the west coast was handled by the Sat3 cable and they were shafting us...
 
W@P said:
Does anyone remember the anticipation way back when we were waiting for seacom to land?
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Took foreva and eva. Was still on 384Kbps back then.....
 
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Really Sad story. With a Heavy hart I just had to tell the admin lady at Herotel to cut my fiber line from 100 to 10 Mbps.
 
Hook said:
The ship the "ILE DE SEIN" is at this moment about 2km offshore from Melkbosstrand. So they are still busy with the landing. I'm wondering if this part, the landing, is just the landing branch to Melkbosstrand from the main Equiano cable. I'm wondering if the main cable has yet arrived in South Africa. The "ILE DE SEIN" arrived in Cape Town yesterday and moved up to Melkbosstrand early this morning. When it came down from Swapkopmund in Namibia it was cruising at 11Knots which, as far as I understand, is too fast to lay cable. Cable is layed at low single digit knots.
Click to expand...
check @philbe2 on twitter for international cable updates
 
This is great, but isn't local peering still the most expensive part of the whole saga?
And then also for mobile phones the available frequencies?

Or would this cable mean SA can finally get onto the world stage where bandwidth is pretty much uncapped everywhere for reasonable price?
 
whatwhat said:
This is great, but isn't local peering still the most expensive part of the whole saga?
And then also for mobile phones the available frequencies?

Or would this cable mean SA can finally get onto the world stage where bandwidth is pretty much uncapped everywhere for reasonable price?
Click to expand...
It won't change a thing, ISPs still have to buy transit costs on the new cable (mainly for redundancy).
 
Liquid Telecom has got 1 fibre pair thus 12Tbps and WIOCC has got 1 fibre pair. Google will probably now fix their South African capacity problem. ie. Youtube and slow Google Drive.
 
Wonderful news about more international Bandwidth to SA. The undersea cable landed? Assuming the ship brought it to shore or close proximity? When will the cable be spliced or connected to the local backbone and available to the public? Does anyone know when we will start seeing the results, if any?
 
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grok said:
Finally, saying goodbye to the ridiculous R29 per gig..
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dont be so sure, our local providers need to make their profit,
its not like you can sit on the beach in Melkbosstrand with an ONT and be directly on the backbone itself.

needs to go through dozens of routers and switches before it gets to the Civilized world.
 
fanuster said:
Wonderful news about more international Bandwidth to SA. The undersea cable landed? Assuming the ship brought it to shore or close proximity? When will the cable be spliced or connected to the local backbone and available to the public? Does anyone know when we will start seeing the results, if any?
Click to expand...
I would say realistically Q1 2023. It's not just about what's happening in SA but the other branch countries for the cable to be ready for service.
 
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