Saint Helena activates long awaited submarine cable connection
As of early this morning, Saint Helena, the British overseas territory located in the South Atlantic Ocean, is no longer reliant on satellite service for connectivity to the global internet. Saint Helena is now, for the first time ever, connected to the internet via high-speed, high-capacity submarine fiber optic cable.
Due to an unfortunate mix of geography and geopolitics, Saint Helena was never connected to any submarine cable in the region, leaving it’s population of 5,298 residents completely dependent on slower, capacity-contrained geostationary satellite service.
It took the tireless advocacy of organizations like A Human Right to successfully lobby submarine cable operators to build a spur to this island. In the end, it was Google who was the one to answer the call. Earlier this year Google added a 1,140km cable branch from it’s Equiano cable, which runs along the west coast of Africa.
To illustrate the improvement in connectivity, the Kentik’s synthetic tests reveal a dramatic drop in latency (from 657ms to 131ms!) from one of our agents in London.
Doug Madory is the director of internet analysis for Kentik where he works on internet infrastructure analysis. The Washington Post dubbed him “The Man who can see the Internet” for his reputation in identifying significant developments in the global layout of the internet. Doug is regularly quoted by major news outlets about developments ranging from national blackouts to BGP hijacks to the activation of submarine cables. Prior to Kentik, he was the lead analyst for Oracle’s internet intelligence team (formerly Dyn Research and Renesys).
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