Important News For Network Capacity Buyers: 2Africa, Blue-Raman, ODUflex Protocol

 1. The West African 2Africa cable segment extending from South Africa to Portugal should be live late February or early March. Excellent opportunity to diversify your network while reducing overall costs. Unfortunately, not clear when the Kenya/Marseille route via the Red Sea will be ready.

Many buyers are currently riding Equiano single threaded or pairing it up with older, much more expensive and outage-prone cables like WACS, MainOne or Glo-1. Between Lisbon/Lagos, Lagos/SA, and Lisbon/SA, 2Africa 100Gs should vary from the upper teens to lower twenties per month on 3 year contracts. Like Equiano, 2Africa is buried deeper than the legacy subsea networks while avoiding the danger spots like the Congo Canyon or its Ivory Coast counterpart, Le Trou Sans Fin. For countries like Ivory Coast I expect carriers to initially hold the line at $35K MRC on 3 year deals, but I expect pricing discipline will disintegrate with pricing headed into the mid-twenties. 

There is no reason to postponing leasing capacity because the RFS data seems solid. If you wait too long, then a provider card shortage could mess up your plans. Sign now for March delivery before the shelves are bare. 

2. Blue-Raman's RFS depends on whom you ask. Ask CLS operators and they say November, 2025. Ask consortium carrier salesmen and they claim 2nd quarter. I think it is pretty clear which party is more reliable. Below is a diagram of Blue-Raman 

3. The ODUflex protocol is an ITU standard that carriers are finally deploying. This means granular Layer 1 waves are available now in Western Europe: 100G, 150G, 200G, 250G, 300G, 350G, and 400G. This allows you to right size your capacity since many of you find 100G to be too little and 400G to be dramatic overkill. For example, 150G would be 1300 Euros on a 3 year term which is close to what many of you pay for 100G today. The other cost saving is fewer cross connects. Multiple 100Gs significantly increase your cross connect expenses particularly in the Equinix facilities which dominate many metro markets. 

One ODU unit is 1.25 Gbps. All existing optical services can be built out these data rate blocks. ODUflex simply allows one to arbitrarily stack them to create a Layer 1 transmission rate of X*1.25Gbps where X is a positive integer. For example, 80 ODUs per second gets you a 100G transmission rate. For more details on the ODUflex: https://lnkd.in/dVMuBrZm. Most wholesale providers deploying ODUflex are offering it in 50G increments. 

Map of Fibre Optic Subsea Cable Blue-Raman

Map of Fibre Optic Subsea Cable 2Africa



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