Maroc Telecom West Africa

Maroc Telecom West Africa (MTWA) is an 8,600 km submarine cable ready for service in 2021. It connects six cable stations across six countries along Africa's Atlantic coast: Casablanca and Dakhla in Morocco, Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire, Lomé in Togo, Cotonou in Benin, and Libreville in Gabon. The cable is owned by Maroc Telecom, a Moroccan telecommunications operator with subsidiaries across francophone Africa. Unlike consortium cables where many owners share capacity, MTWA is a single-owner cable — Maroc Telecom built it to connect its own subsidiaries and to sell wholesale capacity along the route.

MTWA is one of the more unusual cables in our monitoring set. It is operator-owned rather than consortium-built, relatively short as coastal African cables go, and serves a specific geographic niche: North African to West African connectivity that bypasses the long-haul route through Europe entirely. For Moroccan telecom traffic heading to Gabon, MTWA is a 86 ms round-trip. Through Europe — the historical route — the same journey would be 250 ms or more.

86 ms Casablanca to Libreville

Our monitor measures MTWA between Casablanca in Morocco and Libreville in Gabon — the cable's full north-to-south Atlantic coastal traversal. Over 30 days we collected 36 samples, initially reaching the Libreville target via one path and then switching to a shorter-hop path in early April:

The shorter path minimum of 86.3 ms is our headline number. Light in submarine fibre has a theoretical round-trip minimum of 84.2 ms for an 8,600 km path. MTWA is delivering 1.025× the physics floor — essentially the absolute limit of what glass physics allows. 8 to 11 IP hops is also remarkably clean for a route spanning six countries.

The earlier-window path used a probe that routed via a longer terrestrial detour on the African continent, adding approximately 15 ms of latency. When our target-selection logic promoted a cleaner probe in early April, the measurement jumped to the physics-floor baseline. Both paths are valid — both are "MTWA traffic" — but the 86 ms path reflects the cable's architectural best-case latency on the Casablanca-Libreville route.

Why Morocco built its own West African cable

Maroc Telecom's footprint covers ten African countries beyond Morocco: Mali, Burkina Faso, Mauritania, Niger, Côte d'Ivoire, Benin, Togo, Gabon, the Central African Republic, and others. Before MTWA, traffic between Maroc Telecom's Moroccan operations and its West African subsidiaries typically routed over WACS, ACE, or SAT-3/WASC — all consortium cables where Maroc Telecom had minority ownership and paid for capacity on someone else's terms.

Owning MTWA changes that arithmetic. Traffic from Morocco to Gabon (and the intermediate countries where Maroc Telecom operates) now uses capacity Maroc Telecom owns directly, without wholesale fees to consortium partners. The cable's commercial case is essentially intra-company: Maroc Telecom traffic between its national subsidiaries pays no external transit.

This is a relatively new business model for African telecom infrastructure. Historically, African operators shared consortium cables because the capital requirements exceeded what any single operator could fund. Cable manufacturing has become cheaper, coherent modulation has pushed per-pair capacity higher, and operators have grown large enough to justify going it alone. MTWA is one of the earliest major examples of an African operator-owned cable serving its own subsidiary network.

Six landings, six countries

The landing sequence is geographically compact by submarine-cable standards. MTWA's 8,600 km covers a route that more widely-landed cables like WACS (14,530 km) and ACE (17,000 km) cover with more stations and more capacity. MTWA's design philosophy favours directness — each landing is chosen because Maroc Telecom has operating subsidiaries in that country, not because the landing serves regional wholesale demand.

Dakhla, in Morocco's Western Sahara, is a notable secondary landing. The city is a regional hub for Atlantic fishing and, in recent years, a growing waypoint for Moroccan-European solar and green-hydrogen infrastructure plans. MTWA's Dakhla landing gives Western Saharan telecoms a direct high-capacity link to Casablanca and onward — valuable as regional industrial activity grows.

The absence of a Spanish, Portuguese, or French landing is itself notable. Most African cables that touch North Africa extend to at least one European landing — typically Marseille or Lisbon. MTWA does not. It is purely an intra-African cable with Morocco as its northernmost point. For Maroc Telecom, European connectivity is served by its share in other cables; MTWA's job is intra-continental.

Return-direction asymmetry

The forward direction (Casablanca to Libreville) delivers 86 ms. The reverse direction, Libreville to Casablanca, appeared in our dataset briefly with a very different profile: minimums near 219 ms across 14 hops, significantly slower than the forward path and roughly two and a half times the one-way latency.

A 219 ms round-trip corresponds to fibre traversal of about 22,400 km. That is obviously not MTWA, which is only 8,600 km. The reverse path is using a completely different route — likely through Europe, crossing the Mediterranean and Atlantic twice before reaching Casablanca from Gabon.

Why? The likely explanation is the same pattern we documented on WACS: production routing policy often preserves older commercial paths long after a new cable offers a better physical option. Gabonese operators that are not Maroc Telecom subsidiaries may still route Europe-bound traffic via WACS or ACE and back down through Morocco, even though MTWA could handle the Gabon-Morocco segment at physics floor.

The pattern will change over time. As carriers update their BGP preferences to reflect MTWA's direct-route availability, production traffic will migrate onto it — exactly as we are watching happen on Africa-1. For now, MTWA is a mostly intra-Maroc-Telecom cable that provides near-physics-floor performance where it is used, and very different latency where it is not.

What our data proves

• MTWA delivers Casablanca → Libreville at 86.3 ms on the cleanest path, 1.025× the physics floor. Near-theoretical performance across 8,600 km of Atlantic coastal fibre.
• Operator-owned single-sponsor cables are commercially viable in African telecoms. MTWA's single-owner structure gives Maroc Telecom rate control over its own subsidiary traffic without wholesale fees.
• Return-direction traffic still defaults to older paths. Libreville → Casablanca at 219 ms uses a Europe-transit route that predates MTWA and has not yet migrated onto the direct cable.

MTWA is a small, focused, well-engineered cable that serves a specific commercial purpose. It is not going to be referenced in press releases about hyperscaler trans-continental fibre, but it is the kind of infrastructure that determines what a Moroccan enterprise can and cannot do with a Gabonese subsidiary in real-time. 86 ms of latency between Casablanca and Libreville makes interactive business applications practical; 250+ ms through Europe makes them awkward.

Try it yourself

Live data on the MTWA cable page. For context on African West-Atlantic cables, see WACS (2012 consortium), Equiano (2022 Google), and Africa-1 (2026 African-led consortium).