Google is keeping its cards close to its chest regarding the construction of a new undersea cable system called Umoja that will connect South Africa and Australia.
The US internet giant announced last month that the new cable – the first to connect Africa and Australia – would also have a terrestrial component running from Kenya, through Uganda, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zambia and Zimbabwe to South Africa, before crossing the Indian Ocean to Australia.
“Establishing a new route distinct from existing connectivity routes is critical to maintaining a resilient network for a region that has historically experienced high-impact outages,” Google said at the time.
Africa Connect is the name Google has given to the combination of Umoja and its recently completed high-capacity Equiano cable.
TechCentral sent a list of questions to Google regarding the Umoja cable, including:
- What is the design capacity of the Umoja cable? Not answered.
- How many fibre pairs will it utilise? Not answered.
- Who are the investors in the new system (is it only Google)? Answered.
- Where exactly will the landing stations be in South Africa and Australia? Not answered.
- Who will operate the landing station in South Africa? Not answered.
- Who will build the cable? Has a company been appointed yet? Answered.
- How much investment is Google making in building Umoja? Not answered.
- How and where will it connect with Equiano? Not answered.
Google declined to answer most of the questions. However, it did reveal that the terrestrial portion of the cable will be built in collaboration with Liquid Intelligent Technologies, while SubCom has been chosen to manufacture the submarine portion of the Umoja cable.
SubCom
“We are currently working with NEC, SubCom and Alcatel Submarine Networks for various cable systems throughout the world. For this specific project, SubCom was chosen to manufacture and install the submarine component of the Umoja cable,” said Google.
Based in the US, SubCom is one of the four largest submarine cable-laying companies in the world by the length of systems deployed. SubCom operates six cable-laying vessels and has laid more than 840 000 km of cable worldwide.
