Tidings of Good News: Africa-1 Cable Deployment In Middle East

The Africa-1 cable is landing today in Duba, Saudi Arabia, a small port city, where a new CLS awaits it. Right now East African countries are suffering severe subsea cable capacity shortages that have driven 100G prices between Kenya and South Africa into the $40K to $65K per month range. Same for Kenya to Marseille. Only Seacom, 2Africa and Eassy link together the key East African counties. Seacom is a low capacity 2000 era system with chromatic dispersion fibre. Just a couple terabits per second. Eassy has more capacity at 36 Tbps, but both cables are in any case almost completely maxed out. 2Africa has huge capacity with an initial design throughput of 180 Tbps, but it is not connected to Europe via the Red Sea due to the recent Houthi hostilities. The only nearby telecom hub is South Africa. However, much of the East African traffic is ultimately destined for Europe. Hence the delays in lighting the Marseille/Mombasa 2Africa segment which would relieve the network congestion are the root of the problem. 

Long term the successful deployment of the 8 fibre pair Africa-1 combined with 2Africa will lower prices to more reasonable prices for East African countries, but probably still higher than those the West Coast currently enjoys. Africa-1 probably has a 160 Tbps initial design. 2Africa's initial design is 180 Tbps. However, my understanding is that the Pearls component (Middle East and India) of 2Africa has only one fibre pair linking the Middle East and Europe to Kenya. Nonetheless, between 2Africa and Africa-1 the East African telecom community can expect some sorely needed relief from the current astronomical pricing strangling it. Note that the Peace cable has not eased this crunch in part because some consortium providers like CMI are only selling IRUs to Kenya and the others are riding the high prices themselves. 

The Marseille/Egypt 2Africa segment is done and activated. But the real question is whether the Africa-1 and 2Africa consortiums are prepared to take the risk of extending their subsea cables down to Djibouti right across from Yemen and then from Djibouti down to Somalia and Kenya and up to Oman. The Houthis have said the Red Sea is open for business, but the 2Africa consortium remains skeptical. I have no information on the other consortium's stance, but it is probably similar. My guess is that both consortiums will wait a month or two to see if the truce has legs before threading their needles through the Strait of Arden and pass Djibouti.

Map Of 2Africa Fibre Optic Subsea Cable

Map of Africa-1 Fibre Optic Subsea Cable


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