Faster Internet Coming To Africa With Facebook's $1 Billion Cable

Facebook and some of the world's largest telecom carriers including China Mobile are joining forces to build a giant sub-sea cable to help bring more reliable and faster internet across Africa. From a report: The cost of the project will be just under $1 billion, according to three people familiar with the project, who asking not to be identified as the budget hasn't been made public. The 37,000-kilometer (23,000 miles) long cable -- dubbed 2Africa -- will connect Europe to the Middle East and 16 African countries, according to a statement on Thursday. The undersea cable sector is experiencing a resurgence. During the 1990s dot-com boom, phone companies spent more than $20 billion laying fiber-optic lines under the oceans. Now tech giants, led by Facebook and Alphabet's Google, are behind about 80% of the recent investment in transatlantic cable, driven by demand for fast-data transfers used for streaming movies to social messaging.

Uh...You've reached your free article limit

[DethLok]

"You've reached your free article limit." says the page.

Thanks for the informative headline, I guess?

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[thegreatbob]

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05... [techcrunch.com] (just the first one i grabbed; there are other articles out there)

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[The New Guy 2.0]

Bloomberg is a bit pricey to submit articles from these days...

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[account_deleted]

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Sure would be nice

[rsilvergun]

If the US had a foreign policy response to any of this. I mean besides more tariffs.

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[alvinrod]

I'm not really sure why we think we should get to tell countries in Africa who they can or can't work with, nor do we need to to redirect vast quantities of tax payer dollars to fund private investments into any country. If U.S. businesses want to do that with their own money, let them do so, but the government shouldn't spend money trying to protect their investments either.

Our usual foreign policy response has gotten us involved in more messes, wars, and other boondoggles than anything else. I think we

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[account_deleted]

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Step 1 of 10

[FuzzyDaddy2]

The problem isnâ(TM)t getting fiber to the coast. Itâ(TM)s getting the connectivity into the communities from that fiber.

Re: Step 1 of 10

[Type44Q]

Straw baskets full of post-it notes... carried on the head, of course.

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[account_deleted]

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Re: Step 1 of 10

[Type44Q]

How am I to develop as a person if you won't actually challenge me with anything but fabricated silliness?? Adversity builds character, man.

Re: Step 1 of 10

[Type44Q]

That's incredibly racist.

Thanks but I'm a culturalist, not a racist; I don't give two fucks what your color is or your DNA says.

But do I enjoy triggering lightweights?? You tell me.

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[account_deleted]

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Re: Headline lacks nuance.

[Type44Q]

Now, I am not a writer, so my ability to come up with a headline is limited.

These days, most "writers" can't.

Another one?

[rsimpson]

Uh, thanks I guess? We will add it to the other cables we already have serving Africa that provide us with a total of 470 Tb of capacity. What would really be useful though is instead of them laying the cable North/South like all the others, they lay one Easy/West to give us direct connectivity to the Americas and Asian continents without having to go through Europe first.

Re: Another one?

[Type44Q]

I'm surprised that there isn't already one, maybe running from Tenerife to New York or Miami...

That's a VERY specific service

[DontBeAMoran]

...demand for fast-data transfers used for streaming movies to social messaging.

Is there really that many people who stream movies to their social messaging account that they need to add new cables? And why won't those cables be available for everything else? That's way too specific if you ask me.

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[timeOday]

I think that peculiar phrasing reflects facebook/google's motives for financing the bulk of the cable. They want to be big players in how people experience the internet and want everything to come from their platforms, just like how we now take it for granted that almost all video streaming on the web is from youtube.

Peer equality

[reg]

The internet will never truely come to Africa until the current system of tier 1 peering is tackled. Right now the entire continent is essentially seen as a ISP customer, and has to pay a heavy tax for internet connectivity. That makes the cost/GB very high in terms of GDP for most of Africa, especially when speed caps are considered. This is the reason that Internet companies are developing these cables - they need the people to keep growing, but the people cannot afford to be online 24/7 or the upload

Poor Africa ...

[BAReFO0t]

Getting fucked right from the start.

Sorry, I meant zucked!

Faster Nigerian spam!

[Way Smarter Than You]

I was worried they didn't have enough bandwidth because I haven't seen a Nigerian prince in need of help in several months.

"Internet" in quotes

[Hentes]

Facebook's African network is just a large intranet where users can only access Facebook and if they are lucky Wikipedia.

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[account_deleted]

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OOH OF COURSE

[bobdoggit]

I wonder why Facebook wants control of data cables? hhmmmmmmm