Maroc Telecom's Private Cable: One Owner, Six Landings, and an 8,600 km Corporate Backbone

Based on real RIPE Atlas measurements from GeoCables monitoring infrastructure, April 2026.
West Africa is one of the most cable-rich coastlines in the world. Eight major submarine systems land along the corridor from Dakar to Luanda, including consortium giants like 2Africa and ACE and hyperscaler private cables like Google's Equiano. Among them sits one cable that none of the other operators co-own and none of the consortia would have built: Maroc Telecom West Africa, an 8,600-kilometre route owned outright by the Moroccan national operator. Six landings, one owner, and a routing pattern that says more about corporate structure than about geography.

One owner, six landings

Most submarine cables are built by consortia. Even Google's Equiano, listed under a single corporate name, is operated through layered legal entities and lit through landing-station partnerships with local carriers. 2Africa has nine named consortium members. WACS has fifteen. ACE has more than twenty. The Maroc Telecom West Africa cable, by contrast, lists exactly one owner — Maroc Telecom, the partly state-owned Moroccan incumbent — and was put into service in 2021 as a wholly internal piece of corporate infrastructure.

The pattern on the map is unusual. The cable starts in Casablanca, runs south to Dakhla in Western Sahara, then makes a 4,500-kilometre jump down the Atlantic coast — passing Mauritania, Senegal, the Gambia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia without touching any of them — and surfaces at Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire. From there it hooks east through Togo and Benin, jumps over Nigeria, and ends at Libreville in Gabon.

The countries it skips

The skipped countries are not a random list. They include Senegal (which has Dakar, the most-connected hub on the West African coast — six landings) and Nigeria (which has Lagos, with eight). These are the largest internet markets in the region by every measure: population, GDP, traffic, peering. A new cable looking for transit revenue would land in Lagos and Dakar before anywhere else.

Maroc Telecom's cable goes elsewhere, because Maroc Telecom's commercial map is elsewhere. Through its Moov Africa subsidiary brand, the Maroc Telecom group operates retail telecom businesses in Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin, and Gabon — every single landing country south of Morocco on this cable. Senegal has Sonatel (an Orange affiliate); Nigeria has MTN, Airtel, and Globacom; Ghana has MTN and Vodafone Ghana. None of them is part of the Maroc Telecom group, and none of them gets a landing.

This is not a regional backbone. It is intra-corporate fibre — a private cable between a holding company in Casablanca and the operations it controls 4,000 kilometres south.

The straight measurement

The cleanest way to test a cable is to find a probe near one landing and ping a target near another, then trace the path and see whether traffic actually used the cable or routed around it. We did this with a probe in Morocco (RIPE Atlas probe 32925) targeting 41.158.0.1, an IP in Libreville, Gabon. RIPE measurement 162410942:

Eight hops, 86.22 ms. The interesting numbers are at the bottom of the trace. Hop 7, in Casablanca, is the Maroc Telecom landing station: 85.87 ms. Hop 8, in Libreville, is Gabon Telecom's landing: 86.22 ms. The cable itself adds 0.35 ms of measured RTT to the path — essentially the propagation time is dominated by everything before Casablanca, and the cable hop is invisible to the timing budget.

Nothing routes through Europe. Nothing routes through 2Africa or ACE, both of which also connect Morocco and Gabon. The packet hands off from Maroc Telecom's autonomous system (AS6713) directly to Gabon Telecom's autonomous system (AS16058) in a single hop, which is exactly what a privately-owned point-to-point cable looks like in the routing table.

The physics floor

For an 8,600-kilometre fibre path, the theoretical minimum round-trip latency is fixed by the speed of light in glass. At an effective propagation velocity of roughly 204,500 km/s, the floor is 84.17 ms for the full cable length. Our measured minimum is 86.27 ms. The ratio of measured-to-theoretical is 1.025× — the cable delivers 97.5% of physics-limited performance.

This is unusual. Most cables in our dataset run at 1.5× to 3× of the physics floor, the gap being eaten by extra hops, peering through neutral exchanges, congested backhauls, and routing policies that prefer the cheapest path over the shortest. 2.5× is normal. 1.025× means the cable is being used the way it was built to be used: a direct fibre carry between two endpoints, with no diversion.

The reason is the same reason it skips Lagos. With one owner controlling both endpoints and both landing stations, there is no peering negotiation to slow the handoff, no settlement-free transit decision to make, no commercial reason to take a longer path. The packet enters the cable, the packet leaves the cable, and Maroc Telecom controls every router in between.

The reverse direction

Going the other way is messier. Returning measurements from Libreville back to Casablanca consistently report 150 to 220 ms of round-trip latency depending on which target endpoint we probe. Two distinct return paths show up in the data: one converges around 150 ms (against a Maroc Telecom-side IP in the 197.146.0.0/16 block), the other holds steady around 219 ms (against an older 196.1.0.1 endpoint).

The 40 ms symmetry gap between forward (86 ms) and reverse (126–150 ms minimum) tells us the return traffic is not using the same cable. Gabon Telecom has multiple options for getting back to Morocco — 2Africa, ACE, and SAT-3 all touch both Libreville and points near Morocco — and the routing policy on the Gabonese side appears to choose differently from Moroccan-side outbound. The Maroc Telecom cable carries traffic in one direction efficiently and accepts return traffic across whatever path the other operator's BGP prefers. This is a normal pattern for a privately-owned cable: the owner controls the outbound path on its own network, but cannot dictate how upstream peers route packets back.

Where this fits in the West African map

West Africa has accumulated submarine cables in waves. SAT-3/WASC was the original 2002 cable, an AT&T-led consortium that connected the entire coast for the first time. WACS and ACE landed in 2012 within months of each other, both as broad consortia incorporating local carriers. MainOne and Glo-1 are Nigerian-owned cables from 2010 that focused on giving Lagos a direct path to Europe without depending on the older shared infrastructure. Equiano arrived in 2023 as Google's first Africa-dedicated cable, a private trunk for hyperscaler traffic. 2Africa, the longest cable in the world, lit up in 2024 with Meta and Vodafone driving it.

The eight cables sort into three clear groups by ownership. The consortium cables (2Africa, ACE, WACS, SAT-3/WASC) optimise for shared cost and broad regional connectivity — they land at most major cities because every owner wants its own market on the route. The hyperscaler cable (Equiano) optimises for a single company's traffic — its landings reflect Google's data-centre and CDN footprint. The single-carrier cables (Glo-1, MainOne, Maroc Telecom WA) optimise for one operator's commercial footprint — their landings track that operator's customers.

Maroc Telecom's cable is the cleanest example of the third pattern. Glo-1 and MainOne both still serve a transit market beyond their owners (selling capacity to other operators is a normal business). The Maroc Telecom cable, by routing only to subsidiaries of its own corporate parent, is closer to a private dark-fibre run scaled up to ocean distances.

What does the cable do for Africa?

It depends what you mean by "for Africa". The cable does not improve connectivity for Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, or any country it skips — those countries have other cables and were already well-served. It does provide an additional Atlantic option for Côte d'Ivoire, Togo, Benin, and Gabon, all of which have 2 to 6 other cables each but benefit from any redundancy. And it gives Maroc Telecom subsidiaries in those four countries a guaranteed home-team backhaul that does not depend on negotiating peering with a competitor.

For Maroc Telecom's customers in Casablanca, Abidjan, Lomé, Cotonou, and Libreville, the cable is a real infrastructure improvement. For everyone else in West Africa, it is one more line on a map of cables that don't land anywhere they will be used.

What the data shows, in three numbers

• 0.35 ms — the measured RTT addition between the Casablanca landing (hop 7) and the Libreville landing (hop 8), end-to-end across the cable. The lowest "cost of crossing" we have on record for any cable of this length.
• 1.025× — the ratio of measured minimum RTT (86.27 ms) to physics-limited theoretical floor (84.17 ms). Among the tightest physics ratios in the GeoCables dataset.
• 40 ms — the asymmetry between forward (Casablanca → Libreville, 86 ms) and reverse (Libreville → Casablanca, 126 ms minimum). The cable is symmetric; the routing policies on either side are not.

Maroc Telecom built a cable to wire its African empire to its Casablanca headquarters. The map shows a private corporate route dressed up as public submarine infrastructure. The measurements show that, technically, it works exactly as a single-owner point-to-point cable should — fast in the direction the owner controls, slower in the direction it does not.