The 45,000 km long undersea cable will land in 32 other African countries.

The new deep-sea cable project will encircle Africa when complete and is expected to land in Lagos and Kwa Ibo, a river town in Nigeria’s southeast this November, TechCabal has learned.

2Africa is the brainchild of a consortium led by Meta, China Mobile International,  and several telecom companies. When completed it will be the world’s longest undersea cable built to primarily serve Africa. It also holds the title of being the largest undersea cable project constructed in the cost-effective capacity category, thanks to new technology from Alcatel Submarine Networks.

2Africa begins from Genoa in northern Italy and encircles Africa with landings in Spain, France, the Middle East, Pakistan and India. The 45,000 km undersea cable system terminates near the southern tip of the UK.

Photo: Screengrab from Submarine Cable Map

More than 1.2 million kilometres of undersea cables keep the Internet alive. Most of them were laid and owned by telecommunications companies, especially at the turn of the last century during the dot com boom. The more recent surge in internet use that followed the rise of social media and streaming services (known as Over-the-top (OTT) platforms) forced companies like Netflix, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta to begin to move down the internet value chain and build deep sea networks to handle the growing internet traffic.

Meta and Google are reported to be behind roughly 80% of recent investments in transatlantic deep sea cable projects.