Comment by quickthrower2
2 years ago
Looking forward to the new cloud region!
> In July 2019 the Government of St Helena announced that it has issued a letter of intent to connect the island to Equiano. The 1,140Km branch to Saint Helena was completed in 2021 so this cable will provide the first fibre optic connectivity from St Helena to the outside world through both Europe and South Africa.
Compared to the current satellite link the cable will bring almost incredible amounts of capacity. The Government of St Helena estimates that it will deliver several hundred gigabits per second - far more than the island’s population of around 4,400 people{16} could possibly use. The plan is therefore to turn the island into a communications hub, with satellites in space linking via groundstations on the island to the world via the cable. The Government of St Helena believes St Helena’s position in the South Atlantic and its political and physical stability make it an ideal and almost unique location for this use.
Does it have reliable supplies of plentiful and cheap electricity and water?
Because without that, datacenters won't be showing up...
And even if it did, big US companies don't really like to have data centers in places that are too remote, if only because staff have to visit from time to time and don't want to have to take an 8 hour seaplane ride to get there...
They aren't talking about general purposed datacenters, but satellite uplink stations. These new constellations of low-Earth orbit (LEO) internet satellites (like Starlink) can network with each other but eventually need to downlink into a big terrestrial dish where the traffic meets a fiber backbone. It's position in the southern hemisphere, middle of the Atlantic and political stability (still part of keeping the sun from setting on the British Empire) would make this an interesting place for downlink stations.
Not a ton of jobs, but some CapEx for construction and probably a couple dozen people year-round.
Communication hub. Probably just a downlink for Starlink for most of the South Atlantic.