Developed by a consortium comprising Meta, Bayobab (MTN Group), center3 (stc), China Mobile International, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC, the open-access system allows operators, internet service providers, and cloud companies to purchase capacity on equal commercial terms. The final “Pearls” extension, scheduled for activation in 2026, will extend the total length beyond 45,000 km—longer than the Earth’s circumference—and establish a new high-capacity backbone for global data traffic.
Employing advanced spatial division multiplexing (SDM) technology, 2Africa supports up to 16 fibre pairs per cable segment and delivers approximately 180 Tbps of trunk capacity on the West African route alone. The network incorporates undersea optical wavelength switching and enhanced branching units, providing flexible routing and superior fault resilience.
Construction required sophisticated marine operations across challenging seabed environments, including rerouting around the Congo Canyon and increasing burial depth by 50 percent compared with previous systems. More than 35 specialized vessels participated in the multi-year installation program.
Industry analysts project that 2Africa will contribute over US$36 billion to Africa’s economy during its initial years of full operation through improved broadband access, accelerated enterprise growth, expanded cloud services, and new data-center development across the continent.
The system significantly reduces wholesale transit costs and latency, enabling widespread adoption of high-bandwidth applications such as 5G networks, cloud computing, artificial intelligence services, and high-definition video streaming for tens of millions of simultaneous users.
With the main route now live and the Pearls extension approaching completion, 2Africa establishes itself as the primary international connectivity gateway for the African continent and a critical component of the global hyperscale infrastructure ecosystem.
The project demonstrates successful large-scale collaboration among leading telecommunications operators and technology companies to meet the rapidly growing bandwidth demand in one of the world’s fastest-expanding digital markets.
