Operators Djibouti Telecom, Somtel Somalia and Telkom Kenya, along with SubCom, which designs, manufactures, deploys, maintains and operates fibre optic cable networks, have announced that all manufacturing aspects for the Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1 (DARE1) submarine cable system are complete.
DARE1 is a cable system that, the partners say, will bring increased capacity and connectivity to East Africa. It will have four landing stations: Djibouti City (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.
The four cable landing points 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 (reconfigurable optical add-drop multiplexer), 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 fibre-pair trunk, where each pair has a capacity of 40 channels at 300 Gbps.
The loading of the cable onto the marine vessel SubCom Durable commenced on November 13, 2019 and is forecasted to be complete soon. The system is likely to be ready for commercial traffic in June 2020.
