That helps with the West coast, but there are also huge population centers around Lake Victoria/Kenya/Ethiopia that won't have the benefit of a subsea cable?
It's very confusing to me. South Africa is really far out of the way. I guess a 2000 mile round trip from Lagos isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and maybe Kenyans have better connectivity with a data center in the ME or India.
> That helps with the West coast, but there are also huge population centers around Lake Victoria/Kenya/Ethiopia that won't have the benefit of a subsea cable?
African telecoms in general have been making great progress in building terrestrial fiber optic cable links inland from the coastal cable landing stations.
There is a whole lot more fiber (and resiliency/diversity of paths) than there used to be.
For instance the cable landing station in Freetown, Sierra Leone now has terrestrial trenched fiber going in to the interior of the country, through the 2nd through 5th largest sized cities in the country, then east by land into Liberia and forming a ring with the major telecom sites in Monrovia.
Re: Lagos specifically, Nigeria is already served by a number of other submarine fiber cables and has a decent amount of capacity that ultimately ends up in Spain, Portugal, France and the UK at the other end of the sub-sea fiber. Due to the huge population in Nigeria it has seen a lot more commercial telecom development investment money over the past 20 years.
Perhaps the "obvious" answer: that's where their competition is. Azure (Johannesburg) and AWS (Cape Town) both have regions in South Africa.
Google does have some presence on both the western / eastern coasts (Nigeria / Kenya) but in general it's tough to be in many other places when there's not really good connectivity. New fibers will help, of course.
ZA is not the largest African economy (I believe Nigeria is slightly larger, but they also have ~4x the population to "brute force" the numbers), but it is the most developed with a good amount of techies in the area.
This means more workforce to hire from and more customers.
Central Africa from east to west won't have as nice latency, but it'll be potentially better than EU hosting - or at least it's another option available to them. However I doubt they had to suffer 200ms latency on a roundtrip to EU servers like the Southern Africa.
Seems like east Africa would be better served by overland fiber, no? It's a comparatively straight shot to Israel or Dubai, both of which are well served by existing networks.
How would you propose routing an overland fiber from, say, Nairobi to Tel Aviv without going through a war zone, a failed state, or utterly impassable terrain?
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It's very confusing to me. South Africa is really far out of the way. I guess a 2000 mile round trip from Lagos isn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things, and maybe Kenyans have better connectivity with a data center in the ME or India.