Google has another international subsea cable project in the works.
Announced Friday, the Equiano cable will extend from Lisbon, Portugal to Cape Town, South Africa.
"Once complete, Equiano will start in western Europe and run along the West Coast of Africa, between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units along the way that can be used to extend connectivity to additional African countries," Google wrote in a blog post. "The first branch is expected to land in Nigeria."
Google plans to fully fund this new cable. This is the company's third private international cable project. The other two include Curie, linking Chile to Los Angeles, and Dunant, which will extend from Virginia Beach to the French Atlantic coast. Google completed instillation of Curie in April and expects Dunant to be operational by late 2020.
The first phase of the Equiano project, connecting Portugal with South Africa, should be complete by 2021, Google said. The Web giant has already contracted with Alcatel Submarine Networks to build the new cable, which should offer "approximately 20 times more network capacity than the last cable built to serve this region."
"Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching," Google said. "This greatly simplifies the allocation of cable capacity, giving us the flexibility to add and reallocate it in different locations as needed."
In keeping with the pattern of naming its cables after historical figures, Google is honoring Nigerian-born writer and abolitionist Olaudah Equiano with the moniker of its latest. Dunant, meanwhile, is named after Red Cross founder Henry Dunant while Curie honors scientist Marie Curie.