SEACOM Activates one Fiber Pair on Equiano Subsea Cable

SEACOM announced Wednesday (March 15, 2023) it had gone live on the Equiano subsea cable following the cable’s landing in Cape Town, South Africa, in August 2022. SEACOM offers Private Line services with latency speeds of +/-110ms between South Africa and Europe, making it the fastest direct route between the continents. SEACOM services via the Equiano cable has been available.

SEACOM has acquired a full fibre pair with a capacity of 12 Tbps on the Equiano Express Route, allowing for reduced latency between Africa and Europe. SEACOM’s Express Route enables Operators, ISP’s, Telco’s, Content Providers, and Enterprises with the fastest direct path between Africa and Europe with the lowest latency, connecting into key South African and European data centres.

Equiano subsea cable system is the third private international cable owned by Google. Equiano cable stretches 15,000km along the West coast of Africa, connecting Sesimbra (Portugal) to Cape Town (South Africa), with branching units to Lagos (Nigeria), Lomé (Togo), Swakopmund (Namibia) and Rupert's bay (St Helena). Google partners with MEO (a subsidiary of Altice Portugal), Openserve, Paratus, WIOCC, Liquid, CSquared Woezon as landing partners in Portugal, South Africa, Namibia, Nigeria, DR Congo and Togo respectively.

The Equiano cable system is a state-of-the-art infrastructure based on space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, with 12 fiber pairs and an initial design capacity of 144Tbps.

Unlike other major subsea cable systems connecting Africa, operators don’t buy capacity but rather entire fibre pairs on the Equiano cable system.

In addition to SEACOM, other operators such as Liquid, Openserve, WIOCC have acquired one fiber pair on the Equiano cable system as well.

SEACOM has deployed Infinera's industry-leading ICE6 800G technology on its Equiano Express Route. With the industry’s highest spectral efficiency, ICE6 enables SEACOM to maximise the number of high-speed services they can offer, providing multiple terabits of capacity on this critical subsea link.

The Equiano cable now forms part of SEACOM’s subsea cable ecosystem surrounding Africa, which is supported by a continent-wide IP-MPLS network.