Djibouti Telecom has announced that it will extend its Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1 (DARE1) to South Africa by 2028 just a day after Meta announced it had invested in Daraja, Safaricom’s fiber optic cable network.
The cable will link Mombasa to Mtunzini in South Africa, with branches planned for Tanzania, Mozambique and Madagascar and will add new capacity and route diversity between East and Southern Africa.
Launched in 2021, the DARE1 system currently stretches from Djibouti City to Bosaso and Mogadishu in Somalia, and to Mombasa, Kenya, offering 36 terabits per second across three fibre pairs.
The planned 3,200–3,500 km extension will run from Mombasa to Mtunzini, South Africa, with new landing points in Tanzania (Dar es Salaam, Mtwara), Mozambique (Nakala, Beira, Maputo), and Madagascar (Mahajanga, Toliary), the company said Thursday.
Djibouti Telecom said the expansion will transform DARE1 into a “regional African cable,” delivering additional capacity, lower latency, and greater resilience for carriers, enterprises, and cloud providers. Construction is expected to begin in 2026, with the system targeted to go live in 2028.
The DARE1 consortium currently includes Djibouti Telecom, Hormuud Telecom Somalia, Somtel International, and Telkom Kenya.
Telkom Kenya which is the Kenyan partner said the DARE1 is a 36TB cable expected to provide additional transmission options in the country and the greater East Africa region. As an $86 M investment, the DARE 1 sub-sea cable is a 3-fiber pair, with a capacity of 36TB each. Kenya has access to both, one an express route from Djibouti to Mombasa and the second one terminating into Somalia and then Kenya.
The DARE 1 idea was mooted in 2018, paving way for a year-long planning process to chart the cable route from Djibouti to Kenya. By March 2019, the process towards the reception of all the requisite territorial and environmental permits was well underway and concluded in October 2019, when cable laying experts, SubCom began the manufacture of the cable. The process of building and laying of the DARE 1 cable has been ongoing for the past three months before its landing in Mombasa, today. Telkom Kenya will now take up the task of laying and managing the inland fiber optic cabling to various terrestrial locations across the country.