The Daraja Kenya/Oman Cable: Class of 2026

This 24 fibre pair cable connects Mombasa, Kenya to Oman. It is a joint project of META and Safaricom (Kenya's largest mobile provider). Safaricom is the Mombasa landing partner, but META is the cable's sole owner. ASN is the construction partner. Capacity throughput should be a half petabit per second. Safaricom's participation reflects a long term trend for large mobile operators to enter the subsea cable business. Other examples including Vodafone, Bharti, Ooredoo, Axiata, and their subsidiaries. Subsea cable ownership allows mobile operators to expand operations overseas and also reduce the operating expenses for their international voice traffic.

Oman is rapidly becoming a subsea cable hub as it offers an appealing alternative to the United Arab Emirates. The UAE's high cross connect CLS charges constitutes backward protectionism designed to protect its two telecommunication incumbents. Secondly, the UAE is currently simply too close to Iran to be a good place to land or repair cables. Finally, the UAE has not sufficiently deregulated its telecommunications industry to be appealing to the hyperscalers or competitive carriers. Instead, it relies on its status as the Middle East's premier business center to attract cable connectivity. Oman not only has better geography due to its shore with the Indian Ocean, but is much friendlier to subsea cable projects. Cross connect charges for new cables are de minimis. Moreover, Ooredoo Oman, the Omanian subsidiary of the multinational Ooredoo mobile operator, is aggressively moving into the subsea cable space as the 2Africa CLS host and the leader behind the new huge capacity Fiber-In-The-Gulf project. Oman enjoys much higher telecommunications competition with Ooredoo challenging Omantel as opposed to the cozy duopoly of Du and Etisalat in UAE. Hyperscalers prefer competitive telecom landscapes.

Daraja will land in Mombasa with Nyali Exchange serving as the CLS with the SLTEs likely to be in IColo2. On the Omanian side Omantel won the CLS operator business in part because META already uses Ooredoo's 2Africa CLS. So the ability to distribute traffic between two physically diverse Omanian cable landing stations was probably decisive. Also the competition for the business probably drove an aggressive Omantel offer.

The map, courtesy of Submarinenetworks.com, shows that the cable is routed to avoid shallow waters as much as possible. Hyperscalers are obsessed with uptime and so their cables head directly for the deep ocean as opposed to taking shorter paths that increase the likelihood of damage due to ships or turbidity currents. Note that the cable apparently has a branching unit in order to extend Daraja further South. Peace also lands in Mombasa, actually at the same CLS, and also has a branching unit for a Southern extension.

Map of the Fibre Optic Daraja Subsea Cable

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