Subsea Cables RFS 2025 - 2Africa - Part 1

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to  London with European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East,  Africa, India, and Pakistoan. It is unique in having multiple landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, 4 in South Africa, and finally 2 in Congo as well as Kenya, Mozambique, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is to improve network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast. 

The 2Africa cable is a spatial division multiplexing system (SDM). This innovative approach achieves higher aggregate cable throughput via higher fibre pair counts by lowering per pair throughput. 2Africa cable has 16 fibre pairs operating at a relatively modest 11.25 Tbps per pair versus conventional coherent optic cables which average two to eight pairs with pair output of 20 Tbps or higher.  However, 2Africa's aggregate output is 180 Tbps day one versus 100 Tbps or less for small count subsea cables. The secret ingredient is better power management including use of shared optical amplifiers. 2Africa squeezes more bandwidth from the limited juice. 

META is 2Africa's consortium leader. It convinced the other 7 partners to accept several technological and business model innovations that most African carriers would probably have vetoed as they have done so in the past. These milestones include aluminum for the power conductors versus the traditional copper, spatial division multiplexing, the open cable system model, no half circuits, new landings and cable landing stations diverse to the existing undersea cables, and a mandate to terminate the 2Africa fibre at carrier neutral data centers wherever possible.  

Facebook was determined to prevent the problems that have plagued the African subsea cable industry. The first problem is frequent outages caused in part by insufficient burial of cables in shallow territorial waters that make them vulnerable to damage by fishing vessels and anchor dragging. African cables have also usually been routed through geologically active subterranean canyons like the Congo Canyon and Let Trou Sans Fond. Undersea earthquakes cause debris slides in these deep crevices that cause cable outages. In the spring of 2024 four African cables went dark due to a canyon debris slide just off Abidjan's coast. In contrast, 2Africa is routed around the high risk subsea canyons and is buried 2 meters deep. 

But the biggest problem for African telecom has been the cable landing station operator. These operators often build the landing station, but find it difficult to generate sufficient revenue from colocation and power. Hence they resort to extortonist cross connect pricing. A client of mine just got a 10G quote on an older cable system that included a $20K per cross connect charge. The 2Africa cable does not allow this. All CLS pricing and delivery standards were negotiated in advance. Pricing is cost-based instead of opportunistic monopoly pricing. If the CLS operator fails to honor these agreements,  their CLS can be disconnected from the cable and they can lose their free wavelength allocation which is their main revenue source. Furthermore, Facebook forced the consortium to extend the cable to large, carrier neutral data centers wherever possible and place the DWDM kit there. So the CLS' role in many countries is just to power the undersea amplifiers and pass the fibre through to the carrier neutral POP.  For exmpale, the 2Africa Marseille CLS is in one of the Interixion data centers.  

A related problem is lack of physical diversity in general. The reason for the four cable outage in the Spring of 2024 was the fact they used the same CLS and hence had to land on the same beach right off this immense deep subsea chasm. Most 2Africa CLS facilities are new, well designed in terms of redundancey, better managed, and physically diverse from any existing landing stations in terms of back haul and front haul fibre. In fact, 2Africa's slow deployment is in part due to the immense number of landings and new cable landing stations. The Kenya to South Africa network segment went live last autumn with the West African flank including Lisbon and London to be RFS in the next two months. The Middle East region goes live this summer. The unknown variable is the Djiboutito Marseille route through the Red Sea which has been delayed by the threat of Houthi missile strikes.  

Besides META, the consortium includes Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Saudi Telecom Group, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC. Interestingly enough, mobile providers have emerged as key players in recent important subsea consortiums with China Mobile and Vodafone having lots of 2Africa capacity and Bharti Airtel owning both Equiano and 2Africa capacity. Vodafone is landing the cable in many 2Africa countries including the Canary Islands, Crete, Italy, Portugal, South Africa, and Qatar. harti is handling many East African landings and CLS operations. Other important consortium members include Telecom Egypt which provides two new diverse, low latency terrestrial fibre routes from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Telecom Egypt has also built three cable landing stations. Finally, WIOCC is providing space for a South African 2Africa CLS in its Durham Open Access Data Cenre.