Orange Wholesale: a full-service, sustainable subsea operator

The rise of Orange Wholesale introduced an end-to-end service operator to the subsea operations scene, extending and safeguarding global connectivity under the seven seas significantly with sustainability in mind.

Orange Wholesale was formed to provide complete subsea services from cable system design to surveying, cable laying, repairing and collecting, with a true industry-centric approach. Enjoying one of the biggest global submarine footprints and diversified redundancy options, as well as our own cable ship fleet and roots in century-old expertise, we are powering and repowering global subsea connectivity. 

Involved with over 450,000km of subsea cables, Orange Wholesale as a subsea operator combines the forces of several businesses enjoying universal reputation for their quality of service, so that no territory remains blacked out:

• Orange Marine, which lays, fixes and recovers submarine cables worldwide with its fleet of 6 cable ships based in 4 home ports,
• Orange Wholesale International, which provides the connectivity services that run through these cables,
• Orange International Networks, which engineers the telecommunication solutions of the future and deals with global traffic management, rerouting data streams to provide recovery solutions whenever an outage occurs.

Laying, fixing, recovering cables for the whole telecommunication industry

Since its formal constitution, Orange Wholesale already made a stand as a leading subsea operator as it:

• Transported 800 Gigabits of data traffic per wavelength across the Atlantic in partnership with Nokia on Orange’s Dunant cable, extending the capacity transmitted and optimizing spectral efficiency on existing infrastructure,
• Inaugurated the Sophie Germain, a cable ship bringing more sustainable operations to the global subsea scene, emitting 20% less CO2 and 80% less NO than comparable vessels,
• Deployed over 12,000 km of new cables as pure wholesalers with ANJANA for Meta, T3 for Mauritius Telecom and Piano Isole Minori for Infratel,
• Laid another 4,000 km on which we sell capacity with Deep Blue One and Arimao,
• Opened new routes with other major cables like Amitié and 2 Africa,
• Developed new projects like Celia, Pisces Europe, Via Tunisia and SEA-ME-WE-6,
• Spent a record 900 days in maintenance operations, fixing systems off the coasts of Kenya and Congo in August 2023 and Ivory Coast in March 2024.

All these operations were led with an acute concern for environmental sustainability. Our missions are to channel ever more capacity into existing cable systems to further amortize their carbon footprint, fix cables whenever possible, recover phased-out systems both in international waters and on the shore-end, and replace these using the cleanest possible cable ships and drilling techniques to install new ones.