DARE1 subsea cable project for East Africa advances

All manufacturing aspects for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1 (DARE1) submarine cable system are complete and loading of the cable onto the ship SubCom Durable is underway. Subcom reports that the project is progressing on schedule and the system is on track to be ready for commercial traffic in June 2020.

DARE1 will have four landing stations to help expand connectivity in Eastern Africa: Djibouti (Djibouti), Bosaso (Somalia), Mogadishu (Somalia) and Mombasa (Kenya). With a finalised cable length of 4,854 km, DARE1 will include three branching units and 41 dual-stage repeaters to maximise its capacity.  Subcom is the contractor. The project is led by Djibouti Telecom, Telkom Kenya, and Somtel.

The four cable landing points are located in port cities along the eastern coast of Africa and will enable enhanced communication and connection with other cable systems around the globe. In addition to the dual-stage repeaters included on all branches of the system, the Bosaso and Mogadishu segments will be equipped with a switched ROADM, to provide flexible capacity routing and a robust fault protection scheme for the system. The structure of the system also includes three branch units off a three fiber-pair trunk, where each pair has a capacity of 40 channels at 300 Gbps.