An exceptional infrastructure is beginning to materialize. The 2Africa fiber optic submarine cable landed last week in Genoa, in northwestern Italy. This is the first station in a long series since 46 landings are planned in total.
Longer than the circumference of the Earth
Everything comes down to the superlative in this project. 2Africa will be the longest cable in the world since it will stretch over 45,000 km (!), which is more than the circumference of the Earth. It will connect 33 countries when it is likely to come into service in 2024. It will potentially connect three billion people, or 36% of the world’s population, by connecting three continents: Africa, Europe and Asia. In France, he will go through Marseille.
When first announced in 2020, 2Africa was expected to be “only” 37,000 km long. In August 2021, four additional steps were added to extend connectivity to Seychelles, Comoros and Angola, as well as southeastern Nigeria.
Finally, in September of last year, the Pearls extension was added to connect the Gulf, Pakistan and India.
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Meta at work
Within the consortium that initiated the project, we note the presence of Meta, but also of China Mobile, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC. And it is the French branch Alcatel Submarine Networks of Nokia which manufactures and installs the infrastructure in the seabed.
2Africa will embed several innovations. In particular, it will incorporate an innovative aluminum conductor, as well as SDM1 (Spatial Division Multiplexing) technology, which makes it possible to deploy up to sixteen pairs of fibers compared to eight previously. All for more capacity.
It will also embed optical switching technology to manage bandwidth more flexibly. A first in Africa. Finally, it will be buried deeper, so as to prevent boats from accidentally cutting it.
Its main objective is to meet the connectivity needs of Africa and the Middle East. The cable will have a nominal capacity of 180 Tbit/s per second and should provide, according to Meta, almost three times the total capacity of all the submarine cables currently serving Africa.
In all the countries where 2Africa will land, service providers will have the possibility of accessing neutral data centers, that is to say which will not be the sole property of an operator.
Source : Meta