R10-billion Ace cable now peering in SA through Teraco

The multibillion-rand Africa Coast to Europe (Ace) submarine Internet cable system, which connects South Africa and Europe along Africa’s west coast, is now accessible in through data centre operator Teraco’s peering infrastructure.

The US$700-million (R10-billion) Ace system is available for interconnection at all three of Teraco’s South African data centres. The 17 000km-long system is the eighth submarine cable to connect at Teraco facilities.

Ace connects 24 countries. It was landed in South Africa by MTN Group, which provided the fibre backhaul into Teraco’s facilities.

“Data centres like ours acts as the perfect neutral hub for interconnection and data exchange,” said Teraco head of interconnection and peering Michelle McCann in a statement.

“It’s here that onramps and switching points from many different cloud providers and network operators meet, and as companies increasingly embrace a hybrid infrastructure, the integration and interconnection between the different systems and platforms play a much more important role.”

Latency

According to Teraco, Ace reaches about 410 million people, equivalent to 5.2% of the world’s population. Seven African countries were connected to the global terrestrial Internet backbone for the first time by the cable system.

The Ace cable has two fibre pairs and a design capacity of 20Tbit/s. Latency (the network roundtrip time) is 145 milliseconds from Paris to Cape Town and 135ms from Lisbon to Cape Town. – © 2021 NewsCentral Media