Djibouti Telecom and its partners have announced that the supply contract for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express (DARE) submarine cable system has come into force, with TE SubCom as the supplier.
Due for completion by May 2017, the DARE submarine cable system will improve communications along the east coast and Horn of Africa. The 5,400km cable system will provide a high-capacity route connecting Djibouti to Mombasa in Kenya, with branches to three major coastal cities in Somalia (Mogadishu, Berbera, and Bosaso), and an optional branch to Tanzania.
“With high-capacity and low-latency, the DARE system will offer an alternative route to East Africa and the Horn of Africa, easing congestion across existing systems, promoting competition and supplying much needed capacity to a rapidly expanding region,” said M Mohamed Assoweh Bouh, Djibouti Telecom general manager. “We are confident in TE SubCom’s superior technology and operational expertise and look forward to launching the implementation phases of the project.”
With the cable, the consortium operators will be able to take advantage of the cost efficiencies and lower latency of a short-haul cable route, while enjoying the capacity and reliability associated with much larger long-haul systems, through the use of TE SubCom’s scalable system design.
DARE is configured as a two-fibre-pair trunk with each fibre pair having a cross-sectional capacity of 150 channels at 100Gb/s – giving the system a total capacity of up to 30Tb/s. Options for future connectivity to other points of presence will be enabled via TE SubCom’s optical reconfigurable add/drop multiplexing (ROADM) product range.
The DARE consortium is composed of Djibouti Telecom and its partners in Somalia and Kenya. Djibouti Telecom’s aim is to establish the country and itself as an operator as a strategic hub for international telecommunications services in East Africa.
