Senegal Horn of Africa Regional Express (SHARE) Cable project has been officially launched.

The Senegal Horn of Africa Regional Express (SHARE) Cable project, undertaken by Huawei Marine Networks (HMN), has officially begun.

Once complete, the cable will serve as the first high-capacity direct link from Africa to the offshore islands of Cape Verde.

The SHARE system is about 720km long and will connect to Dakar, Senegal, and Praia, Cape Verde.

The cable has a design capacity of 16Tbit/s and will utilise HMN’s submarine communications infrastructure.

While the financial details of the project have not been made public, SHARE is expected to be completed in the first quarter (Q1) of 2020.

A statement issued by the Chinese multinational reads: “Relying on Cape Verde's existing resources of international cables to Europe, South America and other regions, the delivery of the system will introduce new international bandwidth routes to the African continent during the 25-years life cycle, greatly improving the total international export bandwidth of Senegal and even the surrounding regions of West Africa.”

The SHARE cable system is expected to spur the development of Senegal’s ICT and accelerate the development of the region’s digital economy, while boosting Cape Verde’s connectivity capacity.

Apart from SHARE, Senegal is connected to several fibre optic cable systems including ACE (Africa Coast to Europe), MainOne, SAT-3/WASC and Atlantis-2 landing in Dakar, Senegal.

For Cape Verde, it is connected to Atlantis-2, WACS (West Africa Cable System) and Ellalink, and other domestic submarine cables landing in Praia.

Huawei added: “HMN is proud to once again contribute to digital connectivity in the African region through the SHARE system. We will provide industry-leading technology and high-quality delivery services to facilitate the success of the ICT Hub strategy in Senegal.”