Subsea cable sector booms as operators plan new $10 billion investment by 2024

By Adeyemi Adepetun 

30 November 2022   |   5:13 am

The international subsea cable sector is booming with over 450 submarine cables carrying about 95 per cent of all international telecoms service traffic, together with the ever-increasing data traffic generated by the hyperscale cloud companies and big streaming content providers.

   

Reason more and more new submarine systems are either being deployed or planned to help satisfy the insatiable demand for greater capacity, scale and reach. The globe is already spanned by more than 1.5 million miles of underwater fibre optical cables that are practical proof of the whimsical movie maxim “if you build it they will come.”

      

According to a recent industry report by telecoms market research and consulting house, TeleGeography, titled: “A 2022 update on Interconnection Geography,” it noted that since 2017, Africa-Europe connectivity has been at about 80 per cent of total potential capacity. It however, noted a disparity between the North and South African international connections.

   

TeleGeography said North Africa’s international connectivity to Europe is very close to 100 per cent but sub-Saharan Africa’s connectivity to Europe has dropped to about 60 per cent of total potential capacity.

   

Already from the about $1 billion investment some four years back, today, the investments in the various submarine cables that have landed in Nigeria have exceeded $3 billion going by available data. 

   

 Specifically, the cost of SAT3 fibre optic cable, which now belongs to ntel, is put at $600 million. MTN’s WACS costs $650 million; ACE cable, by Dolphin Telecoms, is worth $700 million; while MainOne gulped $300 million. The cost of Globacom’s Glo1 cable is estimated at $250 million, Glo 2 is expected to be in that range.

   

Though the estimated investment of Equiano cable is not public, Google informed that the facility is part of the $1 billion investment support for digital transformation across Africa.

  

Meta’s (Facebook) $1 billion 37,000-kilometer undersea cable is coming to Africa cum Nigeria and should go live by 2023.

According to Senior Research Manager, TeleGeography, Patrick Christian, Europe is of growing importance as a communications hub, which is more than can be said for Brexit Britain, adding that the firm’s latest submarine cable map also shows that the continuing growth of the subsea cable sector will continue to flourish, with more than $10 billion set to be invested in the 2022-2024 period.

   

Meanwhile, and elsewhere, India, which will overtake China to become the most populous country on the planet in 2023, is also expanding its involvement in submarine cable systems and plans to become a key comms hub in South Asia. To that end, Reliance Jio, the sub-continent’s biggest 4G and mobile broadband digital service provider, is set to land the next-generation multi-terabit India-Asia-Xpress (IAX) undersea cable system in Hulhumale in the Maldives. IAX consists of 12 cable landings in five countries, with the main trunk running from Tuas (Singapore) to Mumbai, with branches to Chennai, Matara (Sri Lanka), Satun (Thailand), and Morib (Malaysia).

   

Simultaneously, the 2Africa consortium, comprising China Mobile International, Meta, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), continues to build out to its planned 46 locations.

  

First announced in May 2020, the 2Africa subsea cable system together with its ‘Pearls’ extension will, by 2024, connect Africa, Europe and Asia and provide high-speed international connectivity to some three billion people, that is, some 36 per cent of the global population.