Kolade is the CEO of CSquared, a digital infraco focused on investing in open-access broadband enabling infrastructure throughout Africa.
The Equiano cable was landed in Togo by CSquared in 2022 and services were provisioned in 2023.
As reported by Capacity last week, it was the only modern cable still serving West Africa after damage to the ACE, WACS, MainOne and Sat3 cables on Thursday caused a major internet blackout across West and Central Africa.
Since then, CSquared has been working with carriers across Africa to address the outages, with Kolade saying the company has demonstrated the value of its terrestrial cross border fibre network:
“We have connected our cross-border circuit into Ghana from Togo and also into Benin. We have increased capacity for Togocom, GVA and our other customers in Togo. We have also provided capacity to MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana through the Equiano cable landing station in Lome,” he revealed.
The capacity travelling through Google’s Equiano cable in Lome has increased by four times since before the outage.
“We are activating an additional 300G today, from 100G before the outages to 400G today."
“The demand was unprecedented in such a short time,” he said. “It was an emergency. We have 3tbps of capacity on Equiano and we needed to spec up our nodes to handle the expected increases,”
“We expect that lessons will be learnt and these routes will be used for diversity permanently,” he added.
