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Google ispreparing to buildwhat will be the first subsea fiber - optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia .
The news comes as the major swarm hyperscalers conflict it out for business dollars , with Google playing snatch - up with AWS and Microsoft ’s Azure .
Google ’s annunciation followswidespread outagesacross Africa , which have been attributedto faulty undersea cables . And for a fellowship that trust on resilient connectivity to render its services to consumers and businesses alike , Google ’s clearly trying to capitalise on this to position itself as the solution .
Dubbed “ Umoja , ” its new cable starts off in Kenya and runs through various country , include the Democratic Republic of the Congo , Rwanda , Uganda , Zambia , and Zimbabwe , before reason its land journey in South Africa — notably , home to Google ’s first African data point center region , whichhas been operational in Johannesburgsince the head start of this year .
The telluric part of the route is really already complete , Google confirmed to TechCrunch , which say it worked with a company calledLiquid Intelligent Technologiesfor that section . The work on channeling the cable across the Indian Ocean to Perth , Australia , is now underway — with no confirmed timeline for completion .
“ Umoja will enable African countries to more dependably connect with each other and the rest of the globe , ” Brian Quigley , Google Cloud ’s VP for world-wide internet infrastructure , said in a web log postThursday . “ Establishing a raw path distinct from survive connectivity routes is critical to keep a resilient web for a region that has historically live eminent - shock outages . ”
There arehundreds of cablesspanning the domain ’s seas , oceans , and waterways , with Big Tech — including Amazon , Google , Meta and Microsoft — claiming anincreasingly bang-up stakein the infrastructure . The reason is childlike : The more cables and data centers there are , the better timbre of service they can supply to their customer , be it lower - latency YouTube watercourse or rapid data transfers for initiative build up on swarm computing .
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The current tight subsea cable route to Google ’s planned path for Umojais SUB.CO’sOman Australia Cable ( OAC ) , which opened for business in 2022 — connecting Oman with Perth . Google has also already invested in various cabling projects centered around Africa , includingEquiano , which connects Portugal with Nigeria and South Africa .
Earlier this year , the companyalso announced plansto build what will be one of the first subsea cables plug into South America with Asia - Pacific , running from Chile to Australia via French Polynesia .
While Google has n’t provide a specific timeframe for completing Umoja , a spokesperson told TechCrunch that a typical submarine cable build , from planning to becoming operational , takes around three yr . So we can , perhaps , expect this cable television service to be ready for prime time by around 2026 .
