The consortium building the 2Africa subsea cable system announced the addition of a new segment, the 2Africa Pearls branch, extending to the Arabian Gulf, Indi, and Pakistan. This extension will bring the total length of the 2Africa cable system to over 45,000 kilometres, making it the longest subsea cable system ever deployed.
The consortium comprises China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC. The cable now connects three continents, Africa, Europe and Asia terrestrially through Egypt, and adds landing locations in Oman (Barka), UAE (Abu Dhabi and Kalba), Qatar (Doha), Bahrain (Manama), Kuwait (Kuwait), Iraq (Al-Faw), Pakistan (Karachi), India (Mumbai), and a fourth landing in Saudi Arabia (Al Khobar).
The new 2Africa branch joins recently announced extensions to the Canary Islands, the Seychelles, Comoros Islands, Angola and a new landing to south-east Nigeria. As with other 2Africa cable landings, capacity will be available in Pearls landings at carrier-neutral facilities or open-access cable landing stations.
As first announced in May 2020, 2Africa was planned to bring international connectivity to 1.2 billion people. Today, with the Pearls extension, 2Africa will be providing international connectivity to an additional 1.8 billion people, for 3 billion in total or 36 percent of the global population.
Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) will deploy the new system utilizing new technologies such as SDM that allow the deployment of up to sixteen fibre pairs, double that of older technologies and bringing greater and more cost-effective capacity.
