Facebook Invests In Safaricom's Planned Daraja Cable: Oman to Mombasa
The project is a 24 fibre pair cable linking Oman to Kenya with a branching unit to Djibouti. Facebook is injecting $24 million into the project. Safaricom is a publicly traded mobile operator in Kenya. It is purportedly the largest carrier in the country in terms of revenue. Its 2024 revenues reached $3 billion. ***Facebook's participation is not surprising. It owns only four of 2Africa's 16 pairs. It kept too few pairs for its network needs. While 2Africa's capacity is welcomed, East Africa's point-to-point 100G optical circuits are still quite expensive with prices ranging from high twenties to sixties. This reflects the fact that 2Africa does not yet connect Marseille and the Mediterranean to East Africa due to ongoing hostilities in the Red Sea. In term this raises prices on Seacom and Eassy cables, which are relatively small capacity systems also operating near full capacity. Even with 2Africa, total demand outstrips supply and that fact 2Africa cannot complete t...
