Optical & Fixed Networks

New coastal cable system planned for Kenya

The LuLu Coastal Cable System the Kenyan coast’s first fully protected coastal cable system, has been announced at this week’s ITW Africa digital infrastructure and connectivity event, held in Nairobi.

LuLu is a submarine cable designed to strengthen connectivity along Kenya’s 500 kilometre Indian Ocean coast, linking five strategic landing points from Mombasa to Lamu, including Vipingo Special Economic Zone (SEZ), Kilifi and Malindi.

It is an integrated system combining a submarine cable running along the Indian Ocean seabed with a parallel, protected terrestrial pathway. The developers of the system say that this dual-path protection architecture – submarine and terrestrial running in parallel – delivers the levels of resilience that international cable systems, data centre operators, and enterprise customers require as a baseline operating condition.

It is to be co-developed by INDOI (IOX), a Mauritius-headquartered ICT infrastructure developer, Blue Trade Investments Limited, a Kenyan investment company, ARISE Integrated Industrial Platforms, which designs, finances, conceives and operates industrial ecosystems across Africa, advisory company AfriTrade Consulting Group, and Kingdom Bank, a subsidiary of the Co-operative Bank of Kenya.

The system will use DWDM technology in the 1550nm window, with 144 fibre pairs and a design capacity of up to 60 Tbps per fibre pair. It is designed for a 25-year operational life, with centralised network management, and is expected to be ready for service in Q2 2028, subject to contract execution.

Blue Trade, INDOI’s Kenya-registered infrastructure partner, is the designated cable landing party, regulatory interface, and operational delivery partner for LuLu in Kenya. Blue Trade says its established relationships with Kenya’s regulatory authorities, coastal communities, and government institutions provide the critical local foundation upon which INDOI’s regional infrastructure vision is built and sustained.

The LuLu landing at Vipingo SEZ is described as the catalyst for a broader transformation. The partners say that direct submarine cable connectivity within the SEZ boundary unlocks investment categories that manufacturing infrastructure alone cannot attract: hyperscale data centres, cloud service provider regional nodes, fintech and payment processing platforms, cybersecurity operations centres, and IoT-driven smart manufacturing services, to name only a few.

LuLu’s Mombasa landing will connect the entire coastal system to the global internet backbone from day one giving every LuLu landing station, and every tenant and operator these stations serve, seamless access to existing submarine cables landed in Mombasa and beyond.

As news service SubTel Forum notes, however, the information so far released does not name a system supplier, construction start, route-survey schedule or completed contracts.



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