Update On The Medusa Cable

The AFR-IX cable project has selected Nokia as their primary coherent optics vendor. Medusa will deploy the Nokia 1830 platform that supports coherent optics. Nokia's Infinera acquisition provides the ICE7 coherent optics.

This equipment announcement illustrates how slowly the interesting Medusa project is moving. This project was announced in 2020. While it is smart to delay terminal gear purchases towards the end of the project, subsea cable projects have not historically taken upwards of six or seven years to finish. I can only speculate on the cause of these delays. The system has many landings in dysfunctional North African countries where governments are authoritarian, corrupt, incompetent or compromised by their ownership or control of PTTs. Cable ships are scarce. So booking them for the deployment may have been a big obstacle.

I am disappointed that Medusa made the 'safe choice'. Big projects with lots of cash usually end up picking either Ciena or Infinera for the SLTEs. These are not brave choices. The client cannot pick and choose and combine products from different vendors in forming their network termination equipment. Ciena and Infinera make splashy announcements about how much space and power their latest iterations save the customers, but those savings are a drop in the bucket given the price tags, software upgrades, and port activation fees. The future belongs companies like Smart Optics: smartoptics.com/. Smart Optics is all about vendor interoperability and flexible integration of best in class products. The savings from going the Smart Optics route is at least 30% versus the reigning duopoly.

What happened to the West Coast plans? The telecom street rumor is that Medusa's owners want to extend the network down the West African coast. The insight driving them is that 2Africa and Equiano have inadequate capacity. In a few years Africa will be suffering from capacity shortages. The absence of any Medusa announcement in this regard suggests they have not raised the money. What is problematic about extending a Mediterranean network down the West African coast is the lack of synergy. There is little traffic from Nigeria or Ghana or Ivory Coast to Morocco, Libya, Algeria or Egypt. Right now that traffic goes to Europe for peering or to access content. So any smart investor must ask the question, does 1+1=3 or does it sadly just equal 2. There's no reason here to think the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. The only reason the project has any legs is that a capacity crunch is inevitable long term. The 2Africa cable is the only modern and carrier friendly subsea network serving Africa countries outside the three hubs of South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. That leaves 2Africa to carry the world on its shoulders.