Subsea Cables RFS 2025 - 2Africa - Part 3

My best guess is that this extraordinary project goes fully live by the end of the first quarter of 2025. So far only the Kenya/Tanzania/South Africa segments have been activated and it is not clear whether they passing live traffic at this point. For more details, click on  https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/2africa-cable-set-live-between-south-africa-and-kenya/. 

The 2Africa subsea network is based on the principle of carrier neutrality. So in principle cable landing station ownership or operating licenses should not matter in carrier vendor selection. But until practice proves neutrality is being honored, it is best to request capacity from a provider that operates one or both cable landing stations. This advice does not apply to routes that use carrier neutral data centres to house the CLS. So, for example, the Genoa/South Africa path uses GN1 Equinix to house the CLS in Italy and also Teraco data centres. Opportunistic CLS behavior is far less likely when a carrier neutral data centre is supplying power, space, and cross connects as opposed to the CLS operator. So go for it. 😊

Another consideration is which 2Africa service providers have metro fibre rings. Even small networks purchasing international connectivity often need multiple POPs at one or both end points. This gives an edge to the local African carriers like Transmission Company in Lagos, Bayobab, (South Africa, Nigeria, etc.) and WIOCC. Generally speaking dark fibre as a commercial service is unavailable in most African countries with the exception of South Africa which is undergoing huge long haul and Last Mile fibre optic builds. For example, dark fibre is unavailable in Lagos, which is one of the Continent's major telecom hubs. So it quite possible that building a simple ring connecting the three key telecom hotels in Lagos (OADC, MDXI Equinix, and Rack Centre) could cost $15,000 a month or more at the Layer 1 100G level. That assumes a relatively good price of $5K per metro 100G. On top of that the client must $20K to $30K a month ffor a 100G subsea wave on one of the new, high bandwidth systems like Equiano or 2Africa. Both the Chinese and Indian carriers like Bharti have taken big positions on Equiano and 2Africa, but it is not clear that they have the metro fibre rings to cost effectively distribute traffic to the large number of data centers in places like Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa. In other countries like Sénégal it matters not at all because there is really only one carrier neutral data center in the entire country!