Green light for major undersea fibre-optic cable system for Africa.

The Africa ONE project is a 35,000 km submarine fibre-optic ring, which will literally encircle the African continent, connecting its coastal and land-locked countries as well as its islands. At the third data-gathering meeting in June 1997, the cost of the submarine cable was reduced from $1.6 billion to $1.3 billion to release $300 million for linking land-locked countries.

"Africa needs to reduce its high transit costs and improve its telecommunications with modern technology", said Ahmed Laouyane, Director of the Telecommunications Development Bureau (BDT) and Chairman of the Africa ONE Coordination Committee. "Direct connectivity throughout the continent is still very limited. As a result, a large proportion of inter-African telephone traffic continues to be transited through transit centres outside the continent", he added. "It is estimated that some $300 million to $400 million are lost by African countries each year in this way", he concluded.

The Coordination Committee, set up in November 1995, is made up of a group of African countries (Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tunisia and Zimbabwe), representing the continent's five subregions, as well as the Pan African Telecommunications Union (PATU), the Regional African Satellite Communications Organization (RASCOM), AT&T Submarine Systems, Inc., the African Development Bank and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

Designed to support the economic development goals of all African countries, the project should help foster regional trade and benefit the continent by stimulating traffic. Telecommunication traffic on Africa ONE is projected at some 4 billion minutes in the first year of its operation (1999). The traffic base is expected to grow to some 25 billion minutes by the year 2014.

The total traffic for the continent in 1995 was 4.7 billion minutes. The system takes advantage of the very latest development in undersea fibre-optic technology; it is built on synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH), which is a global standard signal format developed under the auspices of the ITU to foster inter-operability among the world's networks. The Africa ONE system promises this inter-operability, even in cases where countries neither upgrade their networks nor build new ones to SDH standards.

It is estimated that a single fibre pair will provide over 240,000 full bandwidth (64 kbit/s) voice circuits, thus meeting all the cable circuit requirements of African countries for the next 20 years. The undersea cable will contain two fibre pairs, one for providing the primary traffic path and the other for automatic restoration (an important feature of the system).

Africa ONE will work in full complementarity with other existing or planned terrestrial, satellite and submarine cable systems in the region. In particular, it will be integrated with the PANAFTEL terrestrial network, the RASCOM satellite network, emerging global mobile personal communications by satellite systems, as well as the national networks in every participating country.

Specific plans to integrate existing and planned regional networks, including other submarine systems, with Africa ONE were formulated during negotiations between experts from the land-locked countries and their transit partners from the coastal countries, in a series of subregional meeting which began in November 1995.