Telecom Egypt and ASN land Africa-1 subsea cable in Ras Ghareb

Telecom Egypt and Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) have landed the Africa-1 subsea cable system at the Ras Ghareb cable landing station in Egypt.

According to Telecom Egypt, this was the first of two planned landings in Egypt – the second Egypt landing will be on its Mediterranean coast.

The system will employ new terrestrial routes to connect the two landing stations.

Built and deployed by ASN, the system links East Africa with the Middle East, South-Central Asia, and Europe.

The cable, a 10,000km system with eight fiber pairs, is co-owned by a consortium of eight major telecom companies, including Telecom Egypt.

Telecom Egypt added that the cable may also later extend southward from Kenya to Tanzania, Mozambique and South Africa, as well as northward to Tunisia and Italy on the Mediterranean side.

The Ras Ghareb landing is the third to be completed, following earlier landings in Karachi and Mombasa.

Scheduled to be ready for service sometime in 2025, the Africa-1 cable aims to enhance global connectivity, bolster broadband capacity and provide crucial redundancy, particularly in the Red Sea region where outages have been problematic.

Telecom Egypt’s CEO, Mohamed Nasr, highlighted the system’s potential to improve regional connectivity, positioning Egypt as a key hub in the region and driving economic growth.

“By making additional subsea routes available in the growing markets of the Middle East, Asia and Africa, this system will boost broadband capabilities and expand our subsea network to meet the rising demand for reliable, high-speed communications, especially for bandwidth-intensive applications such as artificial intelligence,” Nasr added.

ASN’s chief sales and marketing officer, Paul Gabla, emphasized the project’s transformative potential in improving connectivity across a vast geographic area.

Subsea cable landings
Telecom Egypt and ASN’s successful landing follows the telco’s announcement that it had signed a cooperation agreement to land the first Saudi submarine cable connecting the Kingdom to Egypt with Mobily.

That landing followed the telco’s completion of two cable landing stations in Egypt for the India-Europe-Xpress (IEX) subsea cable system with SubCom in June 2024.

Just in 2024, many companies have worked towards connecting Africa and the Middle East to the rest of the world through subsea cables.

It all started with Telecom Egypt and Zain Omantel International (ZOI) partnering to establish what they call a new digital corridor connecting the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea and Arabian Gulf, in January.

Then in May, ICT solutions provider Angola Cables and Camtel, Cameroon’s incumbent telecommunications operator, joined forces to expand digital and connectivity services in Cameroon and the West Africa region.

That announcement followed Mauritius Telecom’s partnership with Orange and Reliance Jio to build a new subsea cable connecting Africa, Indian Ocean islands and Asia, also in May.

The West Africa Cable System (WACS) and three other lines – the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and South Atlantic-3 (Sat-3) – were disrupted in March 2024 and subsequently fixed in May 2024. That disruption came when a suspected subsea seismic event occurred off the coast of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire on the west coast of Africa, impacting Africa’s Internet services. Connecting Africa