Ask three providers in this market which submarine cables they can reach and you will get three answers that sound similar and mean different things. The word doing the work is usually “access” — which can describe owning the landing station, holding capacity on a system that lands somewhere else, or reselling a circuit from somebody who does one of those two. All three are legitimate. They are not the same purchase, and they do not fail the same way.
There is a way to settle it that does not involve anyone’s marketing. Somalia’s National Communications Authority maintains a public register of submarine cable systems landing in the country. It lists each system, the cities where it comes ashore, the licensed operators, and — the column that matters — who operates the landing station.
What the register shows
Five submarine cable systems land in Somalia, across four cities: Mogadishu, Bosaso, Berbera and Kismayo. That is a considerable change from a decade ago, when the country had none and every byte moved by satellite.
For our own part, the register records Dalkom Somalia as the landing station operator for EASSy at Mogadishu, and for 2Africa at Mogadishu. The other systems on the register are operated by other parties, at other landing points, and the register names them too. We would rather you read it there than take our word for any of it.
Two things follow from that document which are worth stating plainly.
There is no single “Somali gateway”
Several operators run landing stations in Somalia now. Anyone describing themselves as the country’s only route offshore is describing a market that stopped existing some years ago. Competition at the landing point is good for buyers, and it means a diversity design has real options rather than theoretical ones.
“Reachable” and “landed here” are different claims
We reach four submarine systems. Two of them — EASSy and 2Africa — land at our own station in Mogadishu, on equipment we operate. The other two, WACS and EIG, do not land in Somalia at all; we reach them through our shareholding in WIOCC, which is a genuine commercial route to real capacity on real cables, and is not the same instrument as owning the terminal equipment.
We publish that distinction on every page where it applies, because the failure mode it protects against is expensive and common: two “diverse” circuits that turn out to depend on the same landing station, the same backhaul leg, or the same upstream relationship. The diagram looks redundant. The outage is not.
Four questions worth asking any supplier
None of these are hostile. Any provider who has thought about their own network will answer them in a sentence each.
- Which system carries this service, by name? If the answer is “our international capacity”, ask again.
- Who operates the landing station it comes ashore at? Cross-check the answer against the NCA register.
- Where does my protection path diverge from my primary? At the cable? At the station? At the backhaul? Or only in the billing system?
- Is this capacity held directly, or bought from a party who holds it? Both are fine. Only one of them puts your supplier in the room when restoration is being prioritised.
Why the landing station is the part that matters
A submarine cable is remarkably reliable for something lying on a seabed, and remarkably slow to repair when it is not. Repair means a ship, and a ship means weeks. What determines your experience of that event is almost never the cable — it is what happens in the first hour at the landing station, and whether the party you pay is making the restoration decision or waiting to be told.
When you buy from an operator who runs the station, the equipment your traffic terminates on belongs to the company you have a contract with. When you buy through an intermediary, your outage becomes a conversation between two companies, and you are not in the room for it. That is the entire argument, and it only shows up on a bad day — which is precisely why it is worth settling on a good one.
Check it yourself
The register is public, it is maintained by the regulator rather than by any operator, and it takes about two minutes to read. If you are designing anything that depends on international capacity out of Somalia, read it before you read anyone’s proposal — including ours.
Source: National Communications Authority of Somalia — Submarine Cables register. Landing and operator details are as recorded by the NCA; we have not restated the entries for other operators here, because the regulator’s own list is the authority worth citing.
