Subsea Cables RFS 2025 - 2Africa - Part 1

The 2Africa is one of the most ambitious and important subsea cable projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map below shows, it extends from Mumbai to Lisbon, London, Genoa, and Marseille and almost completely encircles Africa. 2Africa has a total of 46 landings which enable it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is unique in having several 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 improvie network resiliency through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos in the country's Southeastern region. Many hundreds of kilometers from Lagos. 

The 2Africa cable is a spatial division multiplexing system (SDM). This approach achieves higher aggregate cable throughput via higher fibre pair counts at the cost of lower throughput per pair. Dunant was the first cable to use SDM and was RFS January 19th, 2021. It has 12 fibre pairs versus the standard 4 to 8 for standard coherent optic networks that maximize per pair throughput. In contrast to this, the 2Africa cable has 16 fibre pairs designed to push traffic at a relatively modest 11.25 Tbps a pair. The low per fibre pair throughput reflects the enormous distance signals must travel to traverse the cable's far end points of London and Mumbai and the sharing of power across a large number of fibre strands. 

META is 2Africa's consortium leader. It convinced the other 7 partners to accept several technological and business model innovations including aluminum power conductors, spatial division multiplexing, the open cable system model, and on-net carrier neutral data centers as service end points opposed to terminating the cable's fibre and Layer 1 services at the landing station. Indeed, the CLS is house in many countries in a major telecom hotel as opposed to being a dedicated detached facility. For example, Marseille Interxion is home to the 2Africa CLS. Another example is Genoa where the CLS resides in  Equinix data center GN1. This pretty much eliminates the opportunistic behavior associated with the traditional African CLS where the operator pursues its own self interest to the detriment of consortium members, their customers, and the host countries. 

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. Bharti is handling many of the East African landings and CLS operations.  Orange has strong retail mobile operations in West Africa. Other important consortium members include Telecom Egypt which provides the low latency transit from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Telecom Egypt has upgrded up its transit infrastructure for this project including new routes and cable landing stations.  Finally, WIOCC is providing space for a South African 2Africa CLS in its Durham Open Access Data Cenre. WIOCC can ensure its data centres are popular by placing 2Africa cable landing stations in them like it did with Equiano in Lagos at OADC. 

Sources of 2Africa information: https://www.2africacable.net/, https://wiocc.net/2africa/, and https://wiocc.net/2africa/.