Not knowing much about the cable market I fail to see the import of this. Touching at South Africa seems to be quite the detour between the US and India from my point of view.
[1]: http://www.itu.int/net4/ITU-D/idi/2016
[2]: https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-brazil-telecoms/spain-...
It doesn’t read like they got together beforehand to discuss the best way to connect New York and Puducherry, rather they were both making connections to South Africa and chose to connect their new routes together afterwards.
It’s an odd way for an African news agency to write about two major undersea cables landing in South Africa.
(admittedly i'm not in the loop on what was there already)
NYC to South Africa is about the same distance.
South Africa to India is about 7000km, so that's the additional distance with this route. But perhaps it's more reliable, there are a lot of ships around Europe.
Latency through existing cables US<->Europe<->India is likely lower.
I for one am definitely concerned about server lag on my FPS server, as one example of an extremely important mission-critical application.
It's only a huge deal in some contexts..
Ignoring this within a critique is in my opinion 'focusing on ping times' hence possibly flawed and probably not so clear analogy.
- Shorter latency between India/SA and US/SA
I agree, it doesn't seem very important w.r.t India-US data transfers