The Seacom Cable 2.0 Project


Seacom announced today the Son of Seacom cable project. It's very ambitious with the goal of connecting Singapore to Marseille with a branch going down the East Africa Coast and up to Angola. I estimate the cable will land in 20 countries including Singapore, India, Pakistan, Oman, Dubai, Djibouti, Sudan, Egypt, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, and what appears to be Angola, but might be one of the two Congos.

The press release claims it will a 48 fibre pair architecture. I am not sure what that means. A 48 fibre pair cable would make Seacom 2.0 one of the most expensive and technically challenging cables ever dropped in the water. In fact, no one has deployed a repeatered 48 subsea cable over long distances I believe the Trans-Atlantic Anjana cable holds the record at 24 fibe pairs and 480 Tbps design capacity. I strongly believe Seacom management will be forced to downsize their ambitions. A much more likely figure will 16 fibre pairs or 24 with the former being much more likely.

Because Seacom serves business and households, it will use an open cable business model to ensure that wholesale clients are not put off by the fact that Seacom may be competing with them in end user markets. Like most new cables, Singapore is included, but China excluded to ensure the maximum appeal to the market. At this point I don't think the project is fully funded. The press release in itself is a way of testing the capacity market and also investor appetite.

The press release talks a lot about Seacom 2.0 enabling a revolutionary wave of AI in Africa, but this more talk to get investors excited than a realistic prospect. The AI bubble (AI=large language models) will pop long before this cable is RFS. I also suggest the copy writers brush up on basic mathematics. The article states that the first Seacom cable cut connectivity by 300%. No, math does not work that way. The large reduction possible is 100%, which means in this case that connectivity costs vanished and became zero. 😆

Map of the Seacom Subsea Cable 2.0 Project


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