Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

The consortium has been coy regarding its plan to bypass the Red Sea. My initial guess was that SMW6's main trunk would land in Oman and head across the Saudi Arabian desert to Egypt. I know more now. The main trunk will land in Bahrain and Kuwait and then go overland to Jeddah. If you view the map, you can see there is a highway making an almost straight line from Bahrain via Riyadh to Jeddah. This approach makes sense because it uses an existing right of way and hence sharply reduces deployment costs. I don't know whether existing terrestrial SA fibre was used or new stuff blown through an empty conduit. Any Saudi terrestrial capacity will be very expensive although pricing may have been tempered by the desire to get the consortium to adopt the route as part of the main trunk. It will be interesting to see if Blue-Raman, Africa-1, 2Africa, and other stalled projects follow a similar path. Such an outcome would be upsetting for many Middle Eastern in the vicinity of the Red Se...

1. Capacity shortages will develop within 2 years because Equiano and 2Africa are insufficient given the vast number of countries they serve. Only South Africa and Nigeria have adequate capacity. But for many countries 2Africa is the only truly modern and reliable system with good long haul pricing and reasonable cross connect fees. Now 2Africa is 180 Tbps, but serves at least 30 countries in total. Even if we exclude the Pearls component, we are looking at Egypt, Italy, France, Portugal, UK, Sudan, Djibouti, Kenya, Somalia, Seychelles, Tanzania, Mozambique, Madagascar, South Africa, Angola, the two Congos, Gabon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Senegal, Togo, and Senegal. I count 27 in the core African network. Divide by 180/27=6.7 Tbps. Capacity shortages are almost guaranteed particularly given some migration from the older, less reliable systems with their high cross connect charges to 2Africa and Equiano. One factor that may alleviate stress on the telecom...