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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 p

by dexwiz 4y ago

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. https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/google-picks-south-africa-for-its-first-cloud-region-in-africa/ https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/05/google-picks-south-africa-...

googlryas 4y ago
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.
- _visgean 4y ago
  I think its mostly commercial? If you look at the map of gdp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#/media/File:African_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita_in_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_G... it makes sense to put the cable this way.. Or even better: https://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=118&r=af&t=10&l=en https://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=118&r=af&t=10&l=en, most users are in SA and NG...
- vitus 4y ago
  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. (blah blah google employee disclaimer)
- ajross 4y ago
  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.
  - adolph 4y ago
    Subsea is more civil war resistant. Also not susceptible to rent seeking from right of way owners.
  - InitialLastName 4y ago
    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?
- walrus01 4y ago
  > 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.
- bhaile 4y ago
  Coming in 2024. https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-africa/2africa https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr... More info available at https://www.2africacable.net/faq https://www.2africacable.net/faq
- TheCapeGreek 4y ago
  As mentioned, the competition is already here. 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.
Havoc 4y ago
There were around 8 undersea cables in place before this so not sure where the poor connectivity angle comes from. It is quite far though - around 100ms latency to Europe which no cable can fix unfortunately
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- ehsankia 4y ago
  Better routing can definitely reduce that 100ms, I don't think that's purely capped by speed of light.
  - Havoc 4y ago
    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.
walrus01 4y ago
One of South Africa's largest and most serious independent datacenter operators (Teraco) was recently acquired by Digital Realty, the US-based behemoth. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=teraco+acquired+south+africa https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=teraco+ac...
matharmin 4y ago
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.
- iso1631 4y ago
  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.

by dexwiz 4y ago

googlryas 4y ago

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.

_visgean 4y ago
I think its mostly commercial? If you look at the map of gdp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#/media/File:African_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita_in_2017.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_countries_by_G... it makes sense to put the cable this way.. Or even better: https://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=118&r=af&t=10&l=en https://www.indexmundi.com/map/?v=118&r=af&t=10&l=en, most users are in SA and NG...
vitus 4y ago
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. (blah blah google employee disclaimer)
ajross 4y ago
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.
- adolph 4y ago
  Subsea is more civil war resistant. Also not susceptible to rent seeking from right of way owners.
- InitialLastName 4y ago
  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?
walrus01 4y ago
> 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.
bhaile 4y ago
Coming in 2024. https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-africa/2africa https://www.submarinenetworks.com/en/systems/asia-europe-afr... More info available at https://www.2africacable.net/faq https://www.2africacable.net/faq
TheCapeGreek 4y ago
As mentioned, the competition is already here. 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.

Havoc 4y ago

There were around 8 undersea cables in place before this so not sure where the poor connectivity angle comes from. It is quite far though - around 100ms latency to Europe which no cable can fix unfortunately

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ehsankia 4y ago
Better routing can definitely reduce that 100ms, I don't think that's purely capped by speed of light.
- Havoc 4y ago
  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.

walrus01 4y ago

One of South Africa's largest and most serious independent datacenter operators (Teraco) was recently acquired by Digital Realty, the US-based behemoth. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=teraco+acquired+south+africa https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=teraco+ac...

matharmin 4y ago

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.

iso1631 4y ago
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.