Google plans to build the first sub-sea fiber-optic connection that connects Australia and Africa. With this move, Google is attempting to stay up with the current battle for market dominance amongst big cloud hyperscalers like AWS and Microsoft Azure.
"Umoja," the initiative, was unveiled in the aftermath of major service outages in Africa, which were frequently brought on by problems with the continent's submerged cables. Google is putting itself in a position to be a major player in fixing these connectivity problems because it depends on reliable connectivity to serve both businesses and consumers.
The Umoja cable will start in Kenya, go via a number of countries, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, before finishing its terrestrial path in South Africa. Additionally, Google's first data center region in Africa is located here in Johannesburg, where it started operations earlier this year.
Google told TechCrunch that the terrestrial portion of Umoja has already been finished in collaboration with Liquid Intelligent Technologies. The next stage of the project, which has no specified completion date, entails running the cable from Perth, Australia across the Indian Ocean.
Google Cloud's vice president of global network infrastructure, Brian Quigley, underlined that Umoja will improve connection both worldwide and inside Africa, creating a new and crucial path for the continent, which has historically had chronic network failures.
As major tech companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta increasingly invest in subsea cables and data centers to improve service quality for their users, from streaming videos with lower latency to facilitating faster enterprise data transfers, it is evident how strategically significant these infrastructure investments are.
Google's Umoja is located close to SUB.CO's Oman Australia Cable (OAC), which connected Perth, Australia, and Oman and started operating in 2022. Google has also made investments in other African cable projects, such as Equiano, which connects Portugal to South Africa and Nigeria, and aims to build a cable that connects South America to the Asia-Pacific area.
Although Umoja's completion date has not been announced by Google, the usual schedule for projects of this kind indicates it could be operating by 2026.
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