In related news Google announced South Africa as the location for its first Cloud Region in Africa. Some arguments I saw against this in comments was possibly poor global connectivity. Also some commenters lamented that Nigeria would also be a good candidate for a region. This cable looks to address both of those points.
While latency to the rest of the world is high, the connectivity is actually pretty decent over the last couple of years. For around 50 USD per month I get a 100Mbps residential fibre connection, and I get close to the maximum speed to the US or Europe.
That is not quite the same things as the dedicated connections that AWS/Google would want between their data centres, but it's not the same connectivity issues we struggled with 15 years ago when we only had one or two subsea cables.
When I first went to our office in Joburg in 2011, we had 7 different DSLs, each with something like a 500MByte cap per month. It's amazing how quickly things have improved.
One of South Africa's largest and most serious independent datacenter operators (Teraco) was recently acquired by Digital Realty, the US-based behemoth.
That helps with the West coast, but there are also huge population centers around Lake Victoria/Kenya/Ethiopia that won't have the benefit of a subsea cable?
It's very confusing to me. South Africa is really far out of the way. I guess a 2000 mile round trip from Lagos isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and maybe Kenyans have better connectivity with a data center in the ME or India.
> That helps with the West coast, but there are also huge population centers around Lake Victoria/Kenya/Ethiopia that won't have the benefit of a subsea cable?
African telecoms in general have been making great progress in building terrestrial fiber optic cable links inland from the coastal cable landing stations.
There is a whole lot more fiber (and resiliency/diversity of paths) than there used to be.
For instance the cable landing station in Freetown, Sierra Leone now has terrestrial trenched fiber going in to the interior of the country, through the 2nd through 5th largest sized cities in the country, then east by land into Liberia and forming a ring with the major telecom sites in Monrovia.
Re: Lagos specifically, Nigeria is already served by a number of other submarine fiber cables and has a decent amount of capacity that ultimately ends up in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK at the other end of the sub-sea fiber. Due to the huge population in Nigeria it has seen a lot more commercial telecom development investment money over the past 20 years.
Perhaps the "obvious" answer: that's where their competition is. Azure (Johannesburg) and AWS (Cape Town) both have regions in South Africa.
Google does have some presence on both the western / eastern coasts (Nigeria / Kenya) but in general it's tough to be in many other places when there's not really good connectivity. New fibers will help, of course.
ZA is not the largest African economy (I believe Nigeria is slightly larger, but they also have ~4x the population to "brute force" the numbers), but it is the most developed with a good amount of techies in the area.
This means more workforce to hire from and more customers.
Central Africa from east to west won't have as nice latency, but it'll be potentially better than EU hosting - or at least it's another option available to them. However I doubt they had to suffer 200ms latency on a roundtrip to EU servers like the Southern Africa.
Seems like east Africa would be better served by overland fiber, no? It's a comparatively straight shot to Israel or Dubai, both of which are well served by existing networks.
How would you propose routing an overland fiber from, say, Nairobi to Tel Aviv without going through a war zone, a failed state, or utterly impassable terrain?
Probably will for google hosted resources, but beyond that no. Each additional cable has been making less & less of a difference on latency, especially for the ones taking approx the same route as existing.
I'd imagine this is more google wanting the traffic on their own wires for strategic/cost/control reasons.
That said more capacity & more redundancy is always a win.
>speed of light.
Yeah it is still well above. Unsure why but as per above more cables doesn't seem to be moving the needle anymore. I believe spacex sat route would shorten it though.
You joke, but I worked on a GPS app that would crash when crossing over the zero meridian. We didn't handle negative zero. The Degree/Minute/Second (DMS) near the meridian will be +/- 0 when degrees is zero. Signed zero is a thing.
This is common in maths when you approach a number 0 in this case) from either side. Your results may be dramatically different, such as "what happens when you approach 0 for f(x) = 1/x"
One of the old referenced article is interesting. They talk about the buoy attracting small fishes, and then bigger fishes, and then fishermen. And some buoys being stolen by fishermen and tracked on their return trip.
That’s also amazed me. “The depth of the seabed beneath the Soul buoy is around 4,940 metres (16,210 ft).” Didn’t realize people did that sort of thing…
I like to ask non-techies how they imagine their text messages go from the US to Europe. Most people think it is some form of wireless communication like satellite or cellular. They are quite surprised when they realize that it is just one really long string over the Atlantic.
It is a highly automated process. It is also not as highly regulated as other construction projects, as the cable won't kill anybody. There are also no vested interests that want internet connectivity to remain bad in Africa.
Oh yes there are: telco incumbents fight furiously to protect their turf. This is why it's 2022 and it's still illegal (!) to provide video calls over the Internet in the UAE.
The UAE's connectivity isn't actually bad. Latency to most of SEA is quite good (50ms to India, 80ms to Singapore).
But for what I assume to be political reasons latency to Europe is about 20 or 30ms higher then what it could be .
When I was there, I could get sub 100ms latency to France using a Wireguard tunnel to an AWS server in Bahrain, while direct connections were closer to 120-130ms.
Overall though, I found connectivity in the UAE to be absolutely fine by middle eastern standards.
Sure, the connectivity itself is fine, the thing that's pathetic is that the only reason they ban calls is to try to protect Etisalat's long-distance phone revenue and to funnel people into its paid alternatives (are they still charging from Botim?).
This. It is more about end-to-end encryption and the government wanting to have the certs to decrypt stuff if necessary.
I was in Dubai twice earlier this year, and among other people I met with Dr Marwan Alzarouni, who helped create the first certificate authority in UAE many years ago. And their group have now released an app that has all your info and you choose what verified credentials to present.
Monaco and Dubai are “police states” if you will, with cameras everywhere and end to end encryption technically illegal. Many people (tourists, businessmen) seem to like that.
Sorry, what were the impacts other than a few weeks of construction noise? The cable is buried under the beach and the seafloor until you get half a mile offshore. According to the link, they left some drilling equipment 60 feet underground, and that's a "disaster"?
This site seems to be dedicated to opposing any sort of development along the Oregon coast, so I guess it's not surprising they didn't like this.
The independent analysis [1] concluded that "there are currently no adverse environmental, scenic, recreational, or economic impacts resulting from the drill break or presence of Remaining Materials 50 to 70 feet below the sea floor, nor is there a reasonably conceived scenario (e.g. earthquake, tsunami, long-term coastal erosion) that would expose the Remaining Materials to the surrounding environment and result in future impacts."
The drilling fluid is in a borehole ~60 feet underground, and has hardened into a solid (as it's designed to do when not under the mechanical stress of drilling). It's mostly water and clay, with a few additives, all of which are below their ecotoxicity threshold concentrations, even at full concentration in the borehole. And if the drilling fluid ever entered the ocean (which it won't), it would be diluted such that "concentrations of the drilling mud additives and their chemical constituents would be orders of magnitude below ecotoxicity threshold concentrations (and therefore non-hazardous to natural resources) and undetectable".
Didn't read the article but from what I understand drilling fluid for environmentally sensitive areas tends to be water with bentonite clay and a small amount of thickener like barium sulfate or calcium carbonate (i.e. seashells) in it.
I wonder if it could be a net positive for the connection point areas.
I'm speculating that areas with undersea cables are often marked as "no anchor" zones due to the risk of damage (in areas where such practices are followed).
So the drop in damage from anchors and extended motor boat presence might eventually outweigh the initial damage from laying the cable.
The idea of net positive is flawed, as multiple local net positives from different disruptions (other than cables) might lead to deterioration of global quality thresholds for sensitive issues, e.g. chains of wetlands required for migratory birds. These global connections are most often unwisely accounted.
I agree. UCLA is building 1 dorm building right now and it's estimated to cost $1.5 billion. Being a Californian real estate project it will no doubt have cost overruns.
This cable would undoubtedly have cost many times that amount had it run along the west coast of the USA rather than Africa. People always forget about currency conversion and purchasing power when having such discussions.
Are you using local talent to lay the cable? I would generally assume you use the same crew and same boats all the way through, who probably dont want to be paid in local currency.
Probably not local talent/currency along the whole route. But if we are comparing to a project off the West Coast of the US where (I think) they'd be required to use a US flagged vessel and American crew, then it still should be far cheaper. And that's before environmental reviews, etc.
There is a cable project currently ongoing for the east coast of the USA, called Confluence-1, to be finished in 2023. I wonder what their budget for that cable is.
To add to this, people would also likely forget that the US west coast is about 1/3 that of Africa’s, so it’ll get you only about as far as Nigeria. Africa is massive!
They would? Growing up we compared continents so it would be the west coast of all of North America from Panama to Alaska as a point of comparison to Africa.
FWIW the SEA-US cable occupies some prime beach town real estate in California and Hawaii and still only cost like $250m. I was looking at the cables that go along the west coast and the ones I checked were even cheaper than that, although they're old enough that inflation could be more of a factor
I was referring to the cost of the materials. If we are talking about labor, sure. Most of the cost I presume isn’t labor though. Materials are imported with a weakened currency.
Google's cash reserves are in USD. Either they are purchasing the materials in USD (so no difference to them), or in the local currency (which works out better when USD is strong). So either way a strong dollar is good for them.
You wrote: <<Google's cash reserves are in USD.>> I tried to search for confirmation of this fact. I cannot find anything. Do you have a source? And, can anyone confirm if you can pay for Google services using non-USD? I assume yes. I cannot believe that Google is selling adverts in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan and not accepting local currency. Also, Google has many, many employees overseas (ex-US), so they need lots of non-USD to pay local employees and expenses (office space, etc.).
Any news of contributions to africa’s development make me happy. I dont know how to describe the feeling. I see the continent as a hidden gem. I am saddened that europe didnt take such initiative and doesnt promote more substantial investment. It’s literarily right next from us.
> The Investment Package will facilitate projects in submarine and terrestrial fibre-optic cables, as well as cloud and data infrastructures. It will also support regulatory frameworks promoting a digital transition that put people at the centre and the principles of trusted connectivity, such as data protection.
> According to a brief (and somewhat detail-thin) explainer that the EU put out, the Global Gateway Investment Package will focus on infrastructure that can facilitate trade and mobility. Also included is a EurAfrica Gateway Cable – an under-sea fibre optic network that will connect sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) with Europe. Another focus is electrification – 600m Africans still lack access to electricity. https://www.ntu.edu.sg/cas/news-events/news/details/europe-p...
So the question for GP would be: we’re they not aware of this investment package? Or were they aware of it and take it for granted? Or were they aware of it but consider it not enough?
Not GP but unless you follow EU politics specifically (as in the politics of the EU rather than of EU nations), which abysmally few do in Europe, you won't have heard of it
And even if you did know it's probably not enough money anyway given the competitor for influence in that area are China and (less but growing last I checked) the US
i wasnt aware of it either but it took me about 5s to google "eu investment africa". EU does a lot of things and national media report on very little so I think it makes sense that almost no one would know about this..
Don't be fooled. It's all posturing.
The EU loves making announcements on how they have a $ package for Africa. But they never follow through. Same for international funds. There are 8 major countries that always follow through: The US, China, UAE, Qatar, Germany, Canada, and some northern European states.
And will we then get to collect the profits while being able to claim that we're benevolent because we've helped, or are we actually gifting the infrastructure to them?
No idea but I think it matters very little who owns the cable, the biggest profit will come with improving the connectivity and improving the economic situation. The EU is going to be profiting from that in very indirect ways...
Well, I know that it's not a 1:1 analogy, but in more extreme ways this reminds me of China owning ports and railways in Africa, or Europe owning cocoa-factories or natural resources and profiting themselves, while claiming that they're bringing jobs and prosperity to Africa.
Cameroon [1] and Ethiopia [2] are in the midst of civil wars. The DRC [3] is close to one. Burkina Faso just had a coup [4]. Zimbabwe had one in 2017, Chad arguably in April [5]. (Guinea Bissau tried and failed to join the club.)
Africa is a big continent. But its geopolitical situation remains uniquely unstable.
I'm not claiming Africa is perfect, only that it's improving steadily and is on track to catching up with the rest of the world. That wasn't always the case.
You never get that with fiber optics to start with - total internal reflection implies the light is traveling a fairly complicated geometry anyway. To do a straight line path it wouldn't be a fiber cable, it would be a tube which you'd have to pressurize and then do a fair bit of work to try and keep from flexing out of alignment (although 3 reflections as opposed to hundreds of thousands probably helps).
As someone who grew up in East Africa and remembers the days when there wasn't a single submarine cable connecting my country to the rest of the world. I'm happy for West Africa but hope that the East gets some more love soon too :)
I'm speculating but that must mean data flowing through. If I understand correctly, capacity is leased to other tiers of the network. So "launched" would presumably mean that capacity is actively being sold and used now.
I was also curious about this: they mention a few times that it’s a privately owned cable, does that also imply it will be used privately (eg only Google services), or will other ISPs be able to rent capacity on it?
Most cables are privately owned, as is most of the internet actually. The telcos juts interface with each other and sell each other bandwidth on their cables.
That said, Google will likely reserve some portion of the cable for their inter-datacenter use. That’s how you get fast cross region data transfer in GCP. Same for AWS and Azure, all have some capacity reserved for data between their datacenters.
Transit is sold in bulk and peered at exchange points. There are SLAs, different rates etc. It's not much different from other kinds of resources, but I don't think it's nearly as automatized as it should be.
Google has a lot of failures of their own but they seem at least semi-committed to an open internet (with actual ethical standards), something I can't exactly say for Zuckerberg
meh, Google is "more open" than others e.g. Apple and even when they're forced to weird a stick, they do it reluctantly.
Instead, like the US government, Google have developed mastery of "soft power" making it statistically-rare that they conduct Putin-like tactics. They know that heavyhanded tactics force heavyhanded responses and are actually a sign of weakness, not strength.
To be fair, if their business model came under _material_ pressure to be locked down, I'm not convinced they'd stay open.
As an example, look at Chrome vs adblockers - they could've shut them down years ago, but only acted when adblockers ate materially into the business and they were forced, again recognizing that they'll lose some users to Firefox and Brave.
I think you are using "open" in one sense (open source) whereas the original meaning may have been in the sense of "more open use".
Obviously yes, Google is more open source than say apple, but clearly less than say red hat. That's not to say Google is "completely open source" but objectively it's "more" than some.
In terms of usability though Google is pretty open.
You can install any software on your android phone, whereas apple controls everything you do on ios.
You can access pretty much all Google services via an api, Facebook and twitter much less so.
In general, Google is more open in that sense.
In the sense of open source, Google is more open than some, but generally would not be considered an "open source company". Other than android there's not much offering there.
How so? You can not profitable sell an Android phone without the closed sourced Google Play Services in any country outside of China any more than you can sell a phone running Darwin.
As you said, they can sell without Google for China and technically it's possible on other market (see Amazon Fire, Meta Quest) and widely used for embeddeds, thanks to open core OS. AppleOS device is by 3rd party strictly impossible.
Yes if you have the resources of a company worth over 1 trillion dollars you too can take advantage of the crumbs bestowed on you by Google to make a successful platform in the West…
You can see other non big tech examples like DJI controller, and don't miss embeddeds like credit card terminal. Anyway no 3rd party can make AppleOS device, period.
For a company with such a competitive moat in global internet bandwidth, i often wonder why they simply don't undercut AWS and Azure on their egress fees and thus cloud bills?
Free unlimited egress would completely change cloud economics.
It's going to happen anyway, either wait to be disrupted by the likes of Cloudflare or do it now and disrupt the industry.
I often struggle to think of something decent from Google. May be when Gmail was spam free and Google Search was fast and accurate. But those didn't last long. If there is one thing I could commend Google, it would be their Datacenter infrastructure and Subsea Cable investment.
A branch from the cable to the island is relatively cheap. And although the population of the island is only around 5000, the human return on this investment is huge.
In simple economic terms it allows Saints (as they are known) to participate in the global digital economy. Both as providers (everything from programmers to call centres) to consumers (basic things like voice,meetings,streaming etc.)
St Helena now has an airport so with connectivity, tourism also improves. Its a lot easier to take a week to visit a truly exotic location if connectivity is also good.
Currently the islands share a small satillite connection, which is very expensive, and very slow.
In summary, the provision of good connectivity in rural areas helps stem the flood to ever larger urban areas, and allows remote communities to both preserve themselves but also participate directly in a global economy.
The airport you mention is also the most expensive airport in the world, by some measures, and the construction of which was a complete fiasco. So I’m not sure what to make of your other comments. Anyway thanks for the reply.
Yes the airport was expensive, not least because of the location, or the need for extensive groundwork.
Yes there were issues with getting it certified because of the unexpected wind sheer.
None of this negates the value of a Internet cable. Indeed it doesn't negate the value of the airport in extending the local economy.
Given the remoteness of the island, and the low population, things will tend to be more expensive than in other places. That doesn't mean we should just ignore the place.
If we develop rural areas in general with good transport and digital links, we encourage populations to disperse and not just congregate in cities. Which imo is a generally good thing.
"In Brussels the following year, SHG UK Representative, Kedell Worboys, along with Director for Latin America & Caribbean, Directorate-General for International Cooperation and Development, Jolita Butkeviciene, signed a Financing Agreement for the Territorial Allocation of the 11th European Development Fund (EDF 11). As a result, €21.5 million was allocated to St Helena to support the delivery of the SHG Digital Strategy through the realisation of the submarine cable to enable faster and more reliable internet connectivity on the Island.[154]"
This one will be harder for Google to kill off but I’m sure someone that pushed for this will use it for a promotion and then it will be half forgotten about.
It does seem a little wasteful to repeatedly transfer something as asynchronous as ads around half the globe when you could just store and serve them from a local data center.
Oh yes, ads waste a lot of resources. But if they tend to be 'tailored to user' then the collected data has to call home first and then choice of ads gets transferred to probably already closed browser tab.
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I think the cable will be use in 5 years from now unless there's a large asteroid impact, nuclear war, or other major catastrophe. Any sum between $1k and $1M should be fine for me. You can choose any reputable betting site as the broker.
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https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/google-picks-south-africa-...