Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Rumors have been floating around for several months about a successor project to AAE1 known as AAE2. Like AAE1, the key goal is to connect Hong Kong and Singapore to India, the Middle East, and Europe. The core consortium includes PCCW, Telecom Egypt, Omantel, and Sparkle. Just like other recent projects such as SMW6, AAE2 will avoid the Red Sea. Instead, the cable will land in Oman, then traverse Saudi Arabia and Egypt to reach the Red Sea. I applaud the cable's designers for ditching the Red Sea. It was long overdue. However, a more logical approach is to avoid Egypt all together. The Saudi Arabian desert will be expensive. The consortium has increased both capex and opex further by using Egypt for transit. Egypt treats subsea cables the way a toll road treats cars. It extracts a monopoly fee from them. It makes no sense given that Israel has a competitive telecom market versus Egypt's pseudo competitive market.  Another interesting design feature is that Italy was mentioned ...

The 2Africa cable is one of the most ambitious and important subsea projects ever undertaken. It spans a record 45,000 kilometers or 28,000 US miles. As the map shows, it extends from Mumbai to  London with European landings, completely encircles Africa, and provides dense Middle Eastern coverage. 2Africa has a record 46 landings which enables it to serve 33 countries across Europe, Middle East,  Africa, India, and Pakistoan. It is unique in having multiple 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 improve network uptime through physical diversity in the form of multiple, widely separated new landings in key countries. For example, the subsea network brings much needed diversity to Nigeria's telecommunications infrastructure with the first CLS outside Lagos several hundred kilometers to the Southeast.  The 2Africa c...