Teraco, Africa’s largest provider of interconnected data centre platforms, is now an integral connectivity and interconnection point for Google’s Equiano sub-sea cable. Equiano starts in Europe and runs along the West Coast of Africa, between Lisbon in Portugal and Cape Town in South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries.

Named after Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, the Equiano cable is state-of-the-art infrastructure based on space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology, with approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region.

Equiano lands in Melkbosstrand, north of Cape Town, and is backhauled via Equiano landing partners including Liquid Telecoms, Telkom’s Openserve, and WIOCC to Teraco’s data centre campus in Cape Town. Teraco’s CT1 and CT2 are strategic interconnection hubs on the African sub-sea cable map with access to Equiano and the cable systems of SAT3/SAFE, ACE and WACS that are already accessible from the facility.

CT1 and CT2 are connected to the JB1 Campus in Isando, Johannesburg, through a wide choice of carriers via diverse regional fibre routes. Equiano will enable clients to increase the number of partners they connect to and expand their reach into new markets. Teraco’s Cape Town facilities offers clients secure co-location and interconnection services, and the ability to leverage Teraco’s digital hubs in Cape Town and Johannesburg directly.

“Equiano, which will be available from all Teraco data centre facilities, is a significant addition to Platform Teraco’s existing ecosystem of over 300 networks, 130 IT service providers, 50 global content providers, and the key global cloud providers,” says Michele McCann, head of platforms at Teraco.

The availability of a new cable servicing the west coast of Africa, and branching into previously unserved countries, broadens the addressable market for digital services providers. It adds new resilience to existing African cable infrastructure and provides telecoms organisations, multinationals and enterprises with additional capacities to empower their digital strategies.

“The cable brings connectivity across regions that were previously hard to reach. Through Teraco, access to this cable is an interconnect away. In keeping with our tagline ‘The world connects here’, we are proud to play a role in accessing this cable system,” says McCann.

It  is now also possible for many west African countries to interconnect at NAPAfrica bringing benefits such as reduced latency, network fault tolerance, reliable traffic exchange, increased routing control, and improved network performance.

Equiano will address the need for more cost-effective bandwidth at the lowest latency, further enabling intercontinental connectivity and the growth of Africa’s access to, and participation in, the digital economy. Teraco makes it easy and accessible for enterprises to connect within the data centre and immediately see the benefits.