Africa-1: RFS 4Q2024

Africa-1 connects the telecom gateway to Europe, the Marseille Interxion campus, to the Middle East and East Africa. Over the last 15 years Marseille has become a telecom hub rivaling Paris, London, and Frankfurt because so many cables land there and place their landing stations in Interxion cages. The cable landing stations in MRS1 and MRS2 led to many carriers colocating in those buildings in order to cross connect to them. So Marseille went from being a telecom nobody in 2010 to a telecom hub today rivaling Europe's most important. The fact that virtually everyone is in Marseille Interxion means there is no need to extend the subsea cable to other cities. Furthermore, France has the largest Arab and Moslem population in Europe. So probably there is a lot of residential and business traffic between France and the Middle East. Algeria is a former French colony. 

Africa-1 links Marseille, Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti,Yemen, UAE, Paksistan, Somalia, and the IT hub of Eastern Africa, Kenya. A mystery surrounding this cable is the long delay from the consortium memorandum signing in 2018 to it going live late this year. I speculate that the Yemen civil war is at least partly responsible. Another possibility is internal consortium dissension as Sudan was an original member, but dropped out of the project. Also planned extensions to South Africa were abandoned. In terms of design, Marseille makes sense as the 'A point' of the cable, but Karachi definitely does not. Mumbai would have much more sense as it would have brought the Indian market on-net and most Asian cables have POPs there.  Indubitably, Mumbai would have generated much more interest in the consortium project. ASN is building the 8 pair system using high performance coherent optics. My guess is that it will be capable of 20 to 25 terabits per second per pair. 


Africa-1 subsea cable map


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