A Comprehensive 2Africa Update

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 many 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, and  Africa. It also serves India and Pakistan. The cable is unique in having many landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, and 4 in South Africa as well as 2 in Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is improving network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multipe, 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 other is in Lagos. 

The 2Africa cable is a spatial division multiplexing system (SDM). This innovative approach achieves higher aggregate cable throughput via higher fibre pair counts by ironically lowering per pair throughput. 2Africa cable has 16 fibre pairs operating at a relatively modest average 11.25 Tbps per pair (the Mediterranean is higher at 20 Tbps a 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 juice. 

META is 2Africa's consortium leader. It convinced the other 7 partners to accept technological and business model innovations that most African carriers would probably have rejected otherwise. These milestones include aluminum for the power conductor on the Mediterranean segment versus the traditional copper, spatial division multiplexing, the open cable system model, full circuit ownership verus traditional half-circuits, new landings and greenfield 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. One 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 crush cables. For example, 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 on average 1.5 - 2 meters deep in shallow water (1000 meters or less). 

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 extortionist 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. This cross connect pricing moat enables each CLS operator to enjoy an effective monopoly on subsea cable sales for the country in equestion. The 2Africa cable does not allow this. All CLS pricing and service delivery standards were negotiated in advance. Pricing is cost-based, reasonable and carrier neutral. If the CLS operator fails to honor these agreements, their CLS can be disconnected from the network. They can also lose their free wavelength allocation which is their main revenue source. Furthermore, Facebook forced the consortium to extend the cable trunk 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 example, the 2Africa Marseille CLS is in an Interixion data center.

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. In contrast, most 2Africa CLS facilities are new, well designed in terms of redundancy, professionally managed, and physically diverse from any existing landing stations, including back haul and front haul fibre. In fact, 2Africa's slow deployment is in part due to the immense number of new landings, cable landing stations and backhaul routes. The Kenya to South Africa network segment went live last autumn with West Africa 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 Djibouti-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 whereas Vodacom and Bharti Airtel own 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 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 cable landing stations to the Mediterranean. Telecom Egypt has also built three new cable landing stations. Finally, WIOCC is providing space for a South African 2Africa CLS in its Durham Open Access Data Cenre. Are there are silent partners in 2Africa? Yes. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have ownership stakes and hence cable capacity.