Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

What most people don't realize is that the following cables have not threaded the Red Sea yet due to the threat of Houthi missile attacks: 1. 2Africa. 2. Africa-1. 3. Blue Raman. 4. IEX. 5. SWM6. It is likely that none of these cables go live this year (2Africa Marseille/Mombasa segment among others ). When I ask industry insiders whether the Red Sea segments for these cables are finished, I get the roar of silence. The impending capacity drought reflects the failure of subsea cable designers and senior carrier management to take seriously their over-reliance on the Red Sea. Even Blue-Raman, which bypasses Egypt, traverses the Red Sea before landing near the Jordanian Aqaba data center. It is time for the telecom industry to work with Saudi Arabia to build routes that completely bypass the Red Sea and hit water on Israel's coast. Even it means neglecting Djibouti. Carrier culture is not innovative. Never has been. Technology comes from the network vendors like Ciena or Infinera...

The Africa-1 cable is landing today in Duba, Saudi Arabia, a small port city, where a new CLS awaits it. Right now East African countries are suffering severe subsea cable capacity shortages that have driven 100G prices between Kenya and South Africa into the $40K to $65K per month range. Same for Kenya to Marseille. Only Seacom, 2Africa and Eassy link together the key East African counties. Seacom is a low capacity 2000 era system with chromatic dispersion fibre. Just a couple terabits per second. Eassy has more capacity at 36 Tbps, but both cables are in any case almost completely maxed out. 2Africa has huge capacity with an initial design throughput of 180 Tbps, but it is not connected to Europe via the Red Sea due to the recent Houthi hostilities. The only nearby telecom hub is South Africa. However, much of the East African traffic is ultimately destined for Europe. Hence the delays in lighting the Marseille/Mombasa 2Africa segment which would relieve the network congestion are th...