Subsea Cable Updates For Africa In 2026

*** There are persistent rumors that the four cables down in the Red Sea will be repaired this month: Falcon, EIG, IMEWE, and SMW4. This rumor puzzles me because last autumn an Israeli air strike killed the Houthi Prime Minister. Subsequently, the ongoing discussions between the Houthi government, the Omani government, and Omantel concerning a long term agreement to exempt cable repair ships from missile targeting collapsed. I am not sure what is happening. Yemen as a country has further disintegrated with UAE-backed separatists in the Hadramout and Al Mahra provinces seeking to establish a state. Yemen is now remarkably fragmented as the maps shows.

*** Medusa is working hard on extending their network to the West African coast. The plan as reported by Winston Qiu is to extend the Medusa Mediterranean network to Senegal, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Cameroon, Gabon, Angola, and South Africa. It is supposedly a 24 fibre pair system. This would put it at the upper end of spatial division multiplexing with a half petabit of total throughput. Note that there has been no formal announcements of a memorandum of understanding so it is likely the project is not fully financed yet. The Cameroon government is looking to take a stake in the project with a $58 million equity purchase. Obviously more modern cables are welcome because Africa faces subsea capacity shortages in as little as two years. The East Coast is already facing $40K plus MRCs on 100G waves between Marseille, Mombasa, and JB.

Map of the Medusa Fibre Optic Subsea Cable

Map of the Red Sea Region With Focus On Yemen


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