The first fiber optic cable is expected to be landed on St. Helena, an island in the South Atlantic ocean that is a British Overseas Territory.
The fiber connection will be a spur from the main trunk of the Equiano cable, a new private subsea cable backed by Google that will connect Africa with Europe. The spur will be 1,140km long.
St. Helena is located 4,000 kilometres (2,500 mi) east of Rio de Janeiro and 1,950 kilometres (1,210 mi) west of the nearest point in Africa (the mouth of the Cunene River on the border between Namibia and Angola). The island has a population of 4,500.
http://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/subsea-cable-to-be-landed-on-st-helena/?highlight=equiano
Google announces Equiano cable from Portugal to South Africa
Google unveiled plans for new private subsea cable connecting Lisbon, Portugal and Cape Town, South Africa with branching units along the west coast of Africa.
The Equiano subsea cable, which is named for Olaudah Equiano, a Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist who was enslaved as a boy, will include a branching unit to Nigeria.
Google plans to use state-of-the-art space-division multiplexing (SDM) technology to achieve approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region.
The cable will be the first to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching. Google says this design will greatly simplify the allocation of cable capacity.
Equiano is fully funded by Google. Alcatel Submarine Networks was awarded a contract in Q4 2018. The first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal, is expected to be completed in 2021.
