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 the Red Sea segment limits supply even more. The most important is East Africa to the Mediterranean and Europe.

***Safaricom's move into subsea cables is part of a general trend. Vodafone was the first major mobile operator to take subsea cable capacity as well as lead projects like the Bay of Bengal Gateway and provide landing services for 2Africa. Recently Mobily, a Saudi Arabian mobile services company announced a cable in partnership with Telecom Egypt to connect the two countries. In many parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa mobile voice and data services have eclipsed the often rudimentary landline networks. Since mobile operators generate most of the voice and Internet traffic in many countries, they naturally are going to become owners and consortium members on subsea cables.

***This deal illustrates Oman's growing importance as a telecom hub. It provides physical diversity to Dubai where most Persian Gulf cables land today. Secondly, Ooredoo is opening up the local market by providing and operating carrier neutral Tier 3 data centers in Barka and Salalah. The 2Africa SLTEs will be in these two data centers so they are effectively serving as the cable landing stations. Dubai has been the dominant telecommunications hub in the Persia Gulf, but its policy of imposing severely high cross connects fees on subsea cables landing there has inhibited the telecom ecosystem. Oman may eventually supplant Dubai as the key hub as both Omantel and Ooredoo wants to host subsea cables. 

Map of Middle East Subsea Cables


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