Cape Town to Penang: 308ms — The SAFE Cable Paradox and Why All Roads Lead Through Marseille

The Traceroute

We ran two fresh RIPE Atlas measurements from Cape Town to TM Net Malaysia (175.139.235.1) on April 4, 2026. Two different ISPs in Cape Town, two different paths out of Africa — but both ending up in the same place before crossing to Asia.

Route 1 (probe 7062, Xneelo, 308ms) — via Lisbon:

Route 2 (probe 3454, TENET, 338ms) — via London:

Five countries, two continents, and a striking paradox: a submarine cable called SAFE connects Cape Town directly to Penang — yet neither route used it. Both went through Europe instead.

Melkbosstrand: Where Africa's Cables Come Ashore

Melkbosstrand is a tiny town of roughly 3,000 people on the West Coast of South Africa, about 50 kilometers north of Cape Town. Its name comes from the Milkwood trees — "melkbos" in Afrikaans — that grow along its wind-swept Atlantic dunes. Surfers know it for the swells. Fishermen know it for the rocks. But network engineers know it for something else entirely: one of Africa's most important cable landing stations.

The cables landing at Melkbosstrand include:

• SAFE (South Africa Far East): 13,500 km, connecting South Africa to Malaysia and Singapore via the Indian Ocean. Commissioned in 2002.
• SAT-3/WASC: 14,350 km, running up the west coast of Africa to Europe.
• Equiano (Google): 15,000 km, a modern high-capacity cable from Portugal to South Africa, operational since 2022.
• WACS (West Africa Cable System): connecting South Africa to the United Kingdom via the west coast of Africa.

The town's entire population could fit in a single apartment building. But the bandwidth under its beaches connects Africa to the world.

Two Roads Out of Cape Town

Route 1 exits Cape Town and appears in Lisbon just 114 milliseconds later. This remarkably fast hop — covering roughly 9,600 km — is almost certainly traveling on Google's Equiano cable, which runs from the Cape Town area directly to Lisbon. Equiano, commissioned in 2022 with a capacity of 200 Tbit/s, is one of the fastest paths from South Africa to Europe.

Route 2 takes a different path. The packets travel through TENET — South Africa's national research and education network — and surface in London after 153 milliseconds. This path likely follows SAT-3/WASC or WACS up the west coast of Africa, then peers at LINX, the London Internet Exchange, one of the world's largest internet exchange points.

The 39-millisecond difference between Lisbon (114 ms) and London (153 ms) reflects a simple geographic reality: Lisbon is approximately 3,000 km closer to Cape Town than London. Light in fiber does not lie about distance.

Marseille: The Mediterranean Crossroads

Both routes converge in Marseille. This is not a coincidence.

Marseille is the undisputed cable capital of the Mediterranean. At least 15 submarine cables land in this ancient port city, founded by Greek sailors as Massalia in 600 BC. Its geographic position — at the northern end of the Mediterranean, close to where cables enter from the Suez Canal — makes it the natural junction between Europe and Asia.

Key submarine cables running from Marseille toward Asia include:

• AAE-1 (Asia-Africa-Europe-1): 25,000 km, landing in Penang among other locations.
• SeaMeWe-5: 20,000 km, landing in Penang and Singapore.
• FLAG/FEA (FLAG Europe-Asia): 28,000 km, landing in Penang.
• IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe): connecting Marseille to Mumbai.

The city hosts major carrier-neutral data centers — Interxion and Digital Realty facilities — where transit providers like Hurricane Electric exchange traffic with submarine cable operators. This concentration of infrastructure creates a dense peering ecosystem that makes Marseille the most efficient place to hand off traffic between European backbones and Asia-bound cables.

The hop from Marseille to Penang — 157 ms in Route 1 — represents a roughly 10,000-km submarine journey through the Mediterranean Sea, the Suez Canal, the Red Sea, around the Arabian Peninsula, across the Indian Ocean, past Sri Lanka, through the Strait of Malacca, and finally to Penang on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia.

The SAFE Cable Paradox

Here is the remarkable thing: a submarine cable called SAFE (South Africa Far East) runs directly from Melkbosstrand to Penang.

Commissioned in 2002, SAFE stretches 13,500 km along this route: Melkbosstrand (near Cape Town) to Mtunzini (east coast of South Africa) to Reunion to Mauritius to Cochin (India) to Penang (Malaysia) to Singapore. It literally connects the two endpoints of our traceroute.

The direct distance through the Indian Ocean from Cape Town to Penang is approximately 9,500 km. The European detour our packets actually took covers approximately 22,000 km.

Yet neither of our two measurements used SAFE. Why would packets travel more than twice the necessary distance when a direct cable exists?

Why Nobody Uses SAFE for This Traffic

Three reasons explain why our packets ignored the direct cable and went through Europe instead.

Ownership. SAFE is owned by a consortium led by Telkom SA and Vodafone. Hurricane Electric — the transit provider carrying our packets across both routes — does not own capacity on SAFE. HE has invested heavily in European and transatlantic routes where it controls its own infrastructure. When you do not own capacity on a cable, you must buy it from someone who does, and the economics rarely favor that over using your own network.

Capacity. SAFE was designed in the late 1990s with a design capacity of 130 Gbit/s. Modern cables like Google's Equiano carry 200 Tbit/s — over 1,500 times more data. SAFE's limited bandwidth means high prices per gigabit, making it uneconomical for transit providers who deal in bulk traffic. The cable is a product of its era, and that era had very different notions of what "high capacity" meant.

The Marseille Effect. Marseille concentrates so many cables, so many carriers, and so much peering that it creates a gravitational pull for traffic. Even when a direct path exists, the economics of shared infrastructure make the indirect path cheaper. The cost of a gigabit through Marseille's dense ecosystem is lower than a gigabit on SAFE's aging fiber. Carriers have already paid for their Marseille presence; every additional gigabit through it costs almost nothing at the margin.

This is a pattern we see across the internet: traffic follows money, not maps.

308ms: What Could Have Been

If our packet had used SAFE, the theoretical minimum round-trip time would be approximately 135 ms. Light in fiber travels at roughly 200 km per millisecond, and 13,500 km of cable yields about 67.5 ms one way, or 135 ms for a round trip. Even with real-world overhead — signal regeneration, routing decisions, buffering — a SAFE route might realistically achieve 180 to 200 ms.

Instead, we measured 308 ms via a 22,000-km European detour. The packet traveled 2.3 times farther than necessary.

But in the economics of the internet, "necessary" is defined by cost per bit, not kilometers traveled. Hurricane Electric sends the packet through its own infrastructure in Europe and hands it off in Marseille because that is the cheapest path, not the shortest one. The roughly 100-millisecond penalty is the price South African users pay for the mismatch between cable geography and cable economics.

The SAFE cable is there, running under the Indian Ocean, connecting Melkbosstrand to Penang almost directly. But owning a cable and using a cable are two very different things. In the submarine cable business, the map shows what is possible; the routing table shows what is profitable.