Submarine cables are easy to overlook: they sit on the seabed, get hit by trawlers, and only appear in the news during repair operations. But they carry roughly 99 % of intercontinental internet traffic, and their physical geography determines latency, redundancy, and which countries hold leverage during regional disputes. Africa's cable map is being remade in the 2020s on an unprecedented scale.
The active buildout
- 2Africa (Meta-led consortium, ~45,000 km when complete). Rings the entire continent with branches into the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf. Targets ~24 landing points across 33 countries. Phased lighting through 2025-2026.
- Equiano (Google, Portugal-South Africa with West African branches). RFS in 2023; the first submarine cable using SDM technology with optical signal-routing handled at landing stations rather than mid-cable.
- Medusa (Mediterranean, with North African landings in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco). Important as a redundancy alternative to the heavily concentrated Egypt-Suez bottleneck where most Asia-Europe traffic transits.
- Africa-1, METISS, PEACE Cable, others — varying combinations of Chinese, Western, and Gulf financing.
Why this matters more than the cargo numbers suggest
Three reasons:
- Latency reset. Pre-Equiano, Lagos-to-London latency was ~120-160 ms via cables that touched many landing points. New cables push that under 80 ms. For real-time applications (cloud workloads, financial services, video) this is a category change.
- Redundancy. Multiple Africa-Europe corridors were historically single points of failure. The 2024 Red Sea cable cuts (multiple cables severed near Yemen) caused weeks of degraded throughput for East African ISPs. Routing diversity is the explicit design goal of new builds.
- Sovereignty implications. Cable landing stations require host-country regulatory approval and physical security. The choice of which countries get landings — and which Chinese-affiliated vs Western-affiliated cables a given country accepts — is increasingly a foreign-policy decision.
The Egypt chokepoint
About 17 % of all global internet traffic transits cables that come ashore at three Egyptian sites near Alexandria and Suez. Telecom Egypt's monopoly over crossings between the Mediterranean and Red Sea makes this a pricing and political-leverage point that the Medusa system and proposed alternative routings around the Cape of Good Hope are explicitly designed to dilute.
Funding dynamics
Hyperscaler-funded cables (Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon) now account for over half of new cable kilometers globally. This shifts the historical model — telecom-consortium funded — toward content-platform funded, with implications for which routes get built and how capacity is priced. African landings benefit from this shift because cloud demand is the marginal use case and African data-center build-out is happening in parallel.