Google has landed its Equiano undersea cable at Telkom’s facility in Melkbosstrand, WIOCC has announced.

WIOCC owns one of Equiano’s 12 terabit-per-second (Tbps) fibre pairs and was Google’s landing partner in Lagos, Nigeria.

Liquid Intelligent Technologies is another already-announced Equiano fibre pair owner.

The South African landing comes a month after the cable arrived in Swakopmund, Namibia.

Equiano landed in Namibia at the beginning of July — three months after it came ashore in Nigeria.

“Our investment in Equiano continues our long-standing policy of making strategic investments in subsea cables,” said WIOCC Group CEO Chris Wood.

“We own almost a third of the >10Tbps EASSy system, which extends from South Africa along Africa’s eastern coastline to Djibouti and Port Sudan,” he said.

“We deliver more capacity than any other carrier on the WACS system, which links South Africa to western Europe and lands in many countries along the west coast of Africa; and we are a member of the 2Africa cable, which will bring another high-capacity connectivity option to Africa during 2023/24.”

The 2Africa cable is a Facebook-led consortium that includes China Mobile, MTN, Orange, Vodafone, and WIOCC.

Wood said that as an Equiano fibre pair owner, WIOCC’s capacity is under its control and upgradeable.

WIOCC owns and manages submarine line terminating equipment for the cable, choosing to light and upgrade its capacity as it wishes.

Wood said they invested several billion rands to enhance their national infrastructure.

He explained that WIOCC has a 16Tbps-ready national network, scaled for circuits up to 100Gbps.

Submarine Networks reported in April 2020 that Google had selected Telkom as its landing partner in South Africa.

The landing station is operated by Openserve, Telkom’s wholesale and networks division.

Openserve will legally and structurally separate from Telkom on 1 September 2022, after functionally separating the organisation from the rest of the company on 13 October 2015.

Openserve operates Telkom’s over 160,000km national fibre network, and its old copper telephone lines.

Its Melkbosstrand cable landing station houses the SAT–3/WASC and SAFE submarine cable systems.

SAT–2 was housed at the same facility and decommissioned in 2013.

According to the report, Equiano follows the old SAT–2 cable route to Melkbosstrand’s beach.