Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

1. The last 2Africa splice should happen in December and the cable is likely to be fully live April, 2025. Not surprising given this is the most complicated submarine cable project ever undertaken with over 40 landings and many new cable landing stations. Right now only the Kenya to South Africa segment is live.  2. Blue-Raman is farther out than many Blue-Raman providers are willing to admit. Not 2nd quarter next year. But year's end for the all-important Marseille/Mumbai segment. Don't be fooled. Salesmen are Liars. 😀 Except for me, of course. 😊 3. I can sell you 5x 100Gs on any of the three Equiano segments today and three months down the road will have 25x 100Gs available on the Equiano cable. Plus I have affordable local loops from Lagos OADC to the other two key Lagos data centers. Moreover, the metro fibre is amplified which is important for ensuring acceptable 400G and 800G wave performance. Most Lagos 

 ***Well informed sources tell me that Blue-Raman is unlikely to go live before November 2025. My suspicion is that this is due to the terrestrial fibre builds across the Saudi Arabian desert as well as Jordan and Israel.  ***The 2Africa cable consortium controls its cable landing stations. So CLS operators are essentially employees. Not Masters of the Universe like in most previous African projects. 😀 In fact, the consortium financed many of the new 2Africa landing stations. And furthermore, not only are cross connect and back haul charges capped, but there are performance standards imposed on operators in terms of delivering power, space, cross connects, and anything else that affects circuit delivery or performance. Below is the 2Africa cable landing in Nigeria. 

This post summarizes many of the key concerns you must keep in mind when in purchasing 2africa capacity. Obviously, the more capacity a vendor has, the lower it can go on price.  In the major telecom hubs like South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria, 2Africa providers typically have fibre to at least one carrier neutral data centre or the CLS itself is in a telecom hotel.  So the minefield of the opportunistic African cable landing station operator can be avoided. Indeed, in many of those countries the CLS itself is really just a cage or a room in a carrier neutral data center just like the Equiano CLS in the Open Access Data Centre in Lagos.  Buyers must be much more careful in the secondary markets. In some of those markets the 2Africa cable has no back haul to telecom hotels and the CLS is revamping itself or portraying itself as a carrier neutral site in accordance with the 2Africa consortium's open cable model. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating as the English say. It is n

My best guess is that this extraordinary project goes fully live by the end of the first quarter of 2025. So far only the Kenya/Tanzania/South Africa segments have been activated and it is not clear whether they passing live traffic at this point. For more details, click on  https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/2africa-cable-set-live-between-south-africa-and-kenya/.  The 2Africa subsea network is based on the principle of carrier neutrality. So in principle cable landing station ownership or operating licenses should not matter in carrier vendor selection. But until practice proves neutrality is being honored, it is best to request capacity from a provider that operates one or both cable landing stations. This advice does not apply to routes that use carrier neutral data centres to house the CLS. So, for example, the Genoa/South Africa path uses GN1 Equinix to house the CLS in Italy and also Teraco data centres. Opportunistic CLS behavior is far less likely when a carrier neutral

2Africa Landings Luando, Angola Manama, Bahrain Moroni, Comoros Muanda, Democratic Republic of Congo Pointe-Noire, Congo Abidjan, Ivory Coast Djibouti City, Djibouti Port Said, Egypt Ras Ghareb, Egypt Suez, Egypt Zafarana, Egypt Marseille, France Libreville, Gabon Accra, Ghana Tympaki, Greece Mumbai, India Al Faw, Iraq Genoa, Italy Mombasa, Kenya Mtwapa, Kenya Kuwait City, Kuwait Mahajanga, Madagascar Maputo, Mozambique Nacala, Mozambique Kwa Ibo, Nigeria Lagos, Nigeria Barka, Oman Salalah, Oman Karachi, Pakistan Caravelos, Portugal Doha, Quatar Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia Duba, Saudi Arabia Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Yanbu, Saudi Arabia Dakar, Senegal Carana, Seychelles Berbera, Somalia Mogadishu, Somalia Amanzimtoti, South Africa Duynefontein, South Africa Ggeberha, South Africa Yzerfontein, South Africa Barcelona, Spain Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain Port Sudan, Sudan Dar Es Salam, Tanzania Abu Dhabi, UAE Kalba, UAE Bude, UK Sources:  https://www.2africacable.net/, https://wiocc.net/2afr

The 2Africa is one of the most ambitious and important subsea cable projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map below shows, it extends from Mumbai to Lisbon, London, Genoa, and Marseille and almost completely encircles Africa. 2Africa has a total of 46 landings which enable it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa. It is unique in having several landings in several countries including 4 in Egypt, 4 in Saudi Arabia, 4 in South Africa, and finally 2 in Congo as well as Kenya, Mozambique, and Spain. A signature theme of the 2Africa project is to improvie network resiliency through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos in the country's Southeastern region. Many hundreds of kilometers from Lagos.  The 2Africa cable is a spatial di