Fibre “express route” connecting Johannesburg and London launched

Paratus Group has announced a fibre “express route” between Johannesburg and London, promising latency of 123 milliseconds and up to 16Tbps capacity.

The route uses Paratus’ newly-completed 1,890km terrestrial fibre link between Johannesburg, South Africa and Swakopmund, Namibia via Botswana.

It calls the route the Botswana Kalahari Fiber.

From Namibia, it connects to Google’s Equiano submarine cable, which lands in Lisbon, London, and other European countries.

The Equiano cable is the only major West coast cable that has remained online after a suspected submarine landslide off the Côte d’Ivoire coast near Abidjan took out four at the same time.

Paratus is the landing partner for the Equiano Subsea Cable in Namibia.

It says its route to Equiano offers an alternative out of South Africa and mitigates against outages between Johannesburg and Cape Town.

“The new Paratus express route offers network operators an unequalled opportunity to elevate their capacity and redundancy where resilience and high-speed performance come as standard,” the company said.

Paratus said it used Infinera FlexILS and GX Series dense wavelength-division multiplexing equipment to provide the advertised performance.