[dsm4ck]

From the article it says their cable had four landings- Togo, Namibia, Nigeria and South Africa. In my opinion the location isn't really the interesting part of the article, it points out how the other major cloud players are already set up in Africa. What took Google so long?

[sofixa]

AWS opened their South African region in 2020, while Azure's DC opened in 2019. 2 pandemic years late isn't that long.

[bombcar]

And if the oceanic cables land in population centers, the latency to other locations might not have been that bad - you wait until you have indication that enough load would shift to your new datacenter before building.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> And if the oceanic cables land in population centers,

The cable will land in Cape Town, a coastal population centre.

Johannesburg is the largest business and population centre, but it's far inland. Cape Town, though it is further south, will have a smaller ping time to US and Europe.

[bombcar]

How good/reliable are the Johannesburg to Cape Town connections? I'd assume they're as good or better than the oceanics leaving.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Sure, but it's 1200 km / 780 miles straight line from CT to JHB.