The Amilcar Cabral West African Subsea Cable Project

There are a large number of desperately poor African states below Senegal and above Cote d'Ivoire on the West African Coast that have access to only one or no submarine cables. These nations include Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and the Gambia. Landlocked countries that would benefit from more subsea capacity adjacent to these coastal states include Mali and Burkino Faso. 

Right now their main bandwidth supplier is ACE, which lands in all the listed coastal states. ACE is ASN's problem child. The kid that is always getting into trouble. It has a reputation for outages and network disruptions. The cable landing station operators in general hold the cable hostage. In Sénégal Orange manages the facility, charges high cross connects fees, and hence has a quasi-monopoly on its capacity. Similar problems bedevil ACE cable landing stations in general. In some countries an ISP consortium manages the cable landings, but abuse still occurs. In Sierra Leone, the government owns the ACE cable capacity, but outsources management to an ISP, Zoodlabs, that has a clear conflict of interest: it is a transit provider. The result is that most Sierra Leone ISPs buy transit from Zoodlabs because the transit is priced lower than the subsea long haul. 

Even in Guinea where a representative consortium of the country's ISPs control the Conakry CLS, recurring cross connect charges for a 10G are $4K per month. It appears the ACE cable landing stations don't have a viable financial model for making money that does not involve predatory pricing. 

In any case, a coalition of West African governments is attempting to build a regional cable linking Cabo Verde, where WACS, Ellalink, and SHARE land, to Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The Cabo Verde PTT has grand designs of becoming a data center player and making Praia a major telecom hub. It recently built a new data center on the island. However, it is not clear that this project makes sense. The ultimate destination is still Europe for peering and content. So imagine a 100G from Sierra Leone to Cabo Verde costs $30K and WACS charges $40K from Cabo Verde to LS1. Well, that is almost a million a year in transport charges whereas I can get an Equiano 100G from Lagos to LS1 for $20K or less. So it is unlikely this project will encourage the growth of the ISP industry in their respective countries. Instead, it is mostly just profit for the government-owned PTTs. Even in the best circumstances a 100G via Cabo Verde will cost at least $60K per month. Ellalink pricing is higher than $30K and the link from Cabo Verde to any of the coastal states participating in the project will be at least $30K. Simply throwing capacity per se at the problem solves nothing. The Capo Verde/Lisbon route is very expensive. Moreover, there is no guarantee cable landing stations will be carrier neutral.



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