The latest landing of the 2Africa cable has been announced: it’s at Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast.
The 2Africa cable had already landed at Telecom Egypt’s cable landing station in Ras Ghareb on the eastern coast of Egypt, in November 2022.
As the Data Centre Dynamics website points out, the Suez Canal is a major thoroughfare for subsea cables crossing between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Despite this, this is only the second cable landing at Port Said following Telecom Egypt’s Red2Med cable that launched last year.
However, Data Centre Dynamics adds, the Africa-1, FEA, Medusa, India-Europe-Xpress (IEX), and SeaMeWe6 cables are all due to land at Port Said over the next two years.
Announced in 2020 by a consortium that includes Meta, Telecom Egypt, China Mobile International, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, STC, Vodafone, and WIOCC, the 2Africa cable, which will circle the African continent is, at 45,000km, among the world's largest subsea cable projects. It will connect 33 countries with 46 landing points across Africa, Europe, and Asia when it is complete.
Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) is responsible for manufacturing and deploying the 16-fibre pair, 180Tbps cable, which is due for completion in 2024. 2Africa has already landed at a number of points in Europe and Africa as well as Saudi Arabia through the Pearls extension, which will also take the cable to Mumbai in India.