Namibia's Paratus selects Infinera’s ICE6 800G for Equiano

Paratus, a network operator serving seven African countries – Angola, Botswana, DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia - has selected  Infinera’s ICE6 800G solution for the Equiano Cable System.

Schalk Erasmus, CEO of the Paratus Group, stresses: “It is imperative to select top technology partners, as is the case in the partnership with Infinera, both for the modernization of the submarine network infrastructure, and for the quality of network provided by the Group to its customers and surrounding communities.” 

“Paratus have worked with Infinera for a number of years on other projects, and this partnership allows Paratus to provide connectivity that is 20 times faster in capacity, modern and flexible to ensure economies of scale, and offers efficiency in the services that the Paratus Group provides throughout its seven operating countries.”

https://www.infinera.com

Google announces Equiano cable from Portugal to South Africa

Sunday, June 30, 2019  Africa, Cable, Google, Subsea  

Google unveiled plans for new private subsea cable connecting Lisbon, Portugal and Cape Town, South Africa with branching units along the west coast of Africa.

The Equiano subsea cable, which is named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, will include a branching unit to Nigeria.

Google plans to use state-of-the-art space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology to achieve approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region.

The cable will be the first to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching. Google says this design will greatly simplify the allocation of cable capacity.

Equiano is fully funded by Google. Alcatel Submarine Networks was awarded a contract in Q4 2018.