Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

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