Google wants entire ecosystem to tap into Equiano cable – Ehimuan

An event was recently held in Lagos, to mark the landing of the Equiano subsea fibre optic cable, expected to deliver faster and cheaper internet in Nigeria (and other parts of Africa). Juliet Ehimuan, director, West Africa at Google, spoke with CALEB OJEWALE on the sidelines of the event, highlighting the facility’s significance and how other stakeholders may benefit from it.

With every cable landing, the primary focus is often about improving internet speed, but I want to ask about cost. How do you see this impacting the cost of internet service in Nigeria?

This Equiano cable is going to provide a lot more bandwidth and our research shows that it would result in six-times increase in internet speed and has the potential to bring down prices by over 20 percent.

We also see a potential contribution to GDP of over $10 billion dollars by 2025. When you think about the opportunities to be created by this additional (internet) capacity, research shows that by 2025 we will have an additional direct and indirect 1.6 million jobs created.

We will be partnering with different providers to distribute this (internet) capacity and if you have increased internet speeds, it means people can do more things (and be more productive).

We have a lot of Nigerians that are using the internet to grow their businesses, to broadcast themselves, learn new skills, to share their content with the world through video platforms like YouTube.

And so when you have the capacity for increased speed and prices come down, a lot of people will do more activities and that would generate growth and create jobs.

For the existing telecommunication companies, do they have anything to worry about or are they going to be benefitting?

It benefits them. It doesn’t threaten them in any way and all our initiatives are always in partnership with stakeholders, and our very important strategic partners.

While we are landing this cable with a local partner (WIOCC), we will be looking to partner with others to actually distribute that capacity. This is something that for us to realize the whole benefits, we will be looking to engage with the entire ecosystem.

I’m curious, the cable was meant to land in Nigeria first but it made a stop in Togo, what happened?

(Laughs) Basically if you think about the route, the cable is coming from Portugal through Togo, Nigeria, Namibia and South Africa, so it is actually an architectural thing.

How soon are we going to start seeing the benefits materialize? What timelines are we looking at for this to start taking effect?

Following the landing, before the end of the year, we are expected to be live.

For local partners that may want to key into this, how can they go about it?

We are already in such conversations through our partners. Our landing partner is WIOCC and interested bodies can just contact them or us to have a conversation.

Read also: Google’s subsea cable targets heart of Nigeria’s internet market

What is in this for Google, why are you investing in this cable?

This is not the first time we are investing on a large scale in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa. We’ve always said that we believe in being a part of the internet growth because if the internet grows, a lot of stakeholders including Google will benefit. We believe in investing and adding value, focusing on the user first and others will follow, that’s our internal philosophy.

And that’s why prior to this time, we have invested in training millions of users with digital skills so that they know how to take advantage of the internet. We have provided digital skills training and we have an African scholarships program for developers.

We have a Google for startups accelerator program to support early-stage technology startups with mentoring, equity-free funding and infrastructure to help them build their businesses. Today we’ve had over 100 startups participating in that program and they’ve subsequently been able to attract incredible amounts of investment and create jobs.

How much is this costing Google?

So we did announce in October last year during our Google for Africa events that we were investing one billion dollars in sub-Saharan Africa over five years, it is in infrastructure, skills development, SME support and a number of other initiatives. This is one of those initiatives.

So we can’t get the actual value for this out of that one billion dollars?

There are a number of factors at play.