Africa's subsea cables in 2026: 2Africa, Equiano, PEACE and the gaps

Africa's international internet runs mostly on undersea cables, and the newest ones are large. Meta announced on 17 November 2025 that the core 2Africa system is complete, and the 2Africa project site quotes capacity of up to 180 terabits per second on its main trunks. Cable cuts in 2023 and 2024 still disrupted many countries, so more cables add choice, not immunity.

Key numbers at a glance

• 2Africa length: 45,000 km once the Pearls extension goes live, scheduled for 2026 (Meta Engineering, 17 November 2025).
• 2Africa reach: lands in 33 countries, built across 50 jurisdictions over nearly six years (Meta Engineering, 17 November 2025).
• 2Africa capacity: up to 180 terabits per second on main trunks (2Africa project website, accessed 19 October 2026); Telecom Egypt gives 168 Tbps for the West segment and over 180 Tbps for Mediterranean segments (Telecom Egypt, 19 November 2025).
• Equiano capacity: 12 fibre pairs, 12 Tbps each, 144 Tbps combined (WIOCC, 14 August 2024).
• Equiano length and service date: 15,000 km, ready for service February 2023 (TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map, accessed 19 October 2026).
• PEACE design capacity: 200 Gbps per wavelength and 192 Tbps total, as announced at the Mombasa landing (Telkom Kenya and PEACE Cable, reported by HapaKenya, 29 March 2022).
• Africa-1: 10,000 km, eight fibre pairs, 96 Tbps (Capacity Media, 5 February 2025); ready for service now listed as 2027, planned (TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026).
• March 2024 West Africa cuts: four cables damaged, 13 countries affected (Cloudflare, Q1 2024 disruption summary).
• August 2023 repairs off Angola and the DRC: 30 days for WACS, 37 for ACE, 43 for SAT-3/WASC (TeleGeography, 15 March 2024).
• Global cable faults: roughly 200 a year, about two thirds caused by fishing vessels and dragging anchors (TeleGeography FAQ citing the International Cable Protection Committee, accessed 19 October 2026).
• Egypt: 24 cables listed, 18 in service and 6 planned (TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026).
• Average data centre occupancy outside South Africa: close to one third of available capacity (Africa Data Centres Association and Rising Advisory report of 24 February 2026, as reported by Kapitalis).

Terms first

A submarine cable is a bundle of optical fibre strands in a protective sheath, laid on the seabed between landing stations on the coast. Light pulses carry data. Repeaters along the way boost the signal over long distances.

A fibre pair is two strands, one for each direction. Cable capacity is usually quoted per pair and then multiplied by the number of pairs. A terabit per second (Tbps) is a thousand gigabits per second. TeleGeography, the telecoms research firm that maintains the widely used Submarine Cable Map, separates potential capacity, the total a cable could carry if the owner installed all available equipment at the ends, from lit capacity, the amount actually running over it. Potential capacity is the figure most often quoted in announcements and the press. Lit capacity is usually far lower, and the gap can last for years as operators add equipment only when demand justifies it.

A landing station is the building on shore where the cable comes out of the water and meets the national network. A landing party is the company that owns or operates that station. An internet exchange point (IXP) is a neutral meeting room where networks swap traffic locally instead of sending it abroad and back. Latency is the delay between sending a request and getting a reply, and it is mostly set by distance.

Ready for service (RFS) is the date a cable is cleared to carry customer traffic. A cable can be built, landed and tested well before it is sold in every country it touches, which is why the 2Africa site says it is "ready for service in most landing countries" rather than all.

Why cables matter more than satellites here

Satellites carry only a small share of international traffic. TeleGeography's FAQ quotes the US Federal Communications Commission figure that satellites account for just 0.37 percent of all US international capacity. That figure is for the United States and no equivalent African figure is given there, but the cable lists below show how many separate seabed systems each coastal market depends on.

For African users this has a practical meaning. Much of the content they use, from cloud applications to streaming and software updates, has historically been hosted in Europe or North America. Every request travels along a cable to get there. When a cable fails, the effect is not only a slower video. Banks, cloud services, government portals and apps that depend on foreign hosting can all slow down or fail at once. More cables and more local data centres reduce both the risk and the average distance a request has to travel.

This is also why connectivity and data centres are linked questions. In February 2026 the Africa Data Centres Association and Rising Advisory said power supply, rather than fibre connectivity, has become the main constraint on new sites, as reported by Kapitalis. That does not say fibre is solved. It says that for a developer choosing where to build, reliable electricity has become harder to secure than a network connection in the places being considered. A related post, Africa data centre growth in 2026, covers the capacity side.

2Africa: the largest build

Meta first described 2Africa in May 2020 as a 37,000 km cable that would interconnect 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe, with up to 16 fibre pairs. The project grew. In its 17 November 2025 completion post, Meta said the complete system length will be 45,000 km once the Pearls extension goes live in 2026, that the cable lands in 33 countries, and that deployment spanned 50 jurisdictions and nearly six years of work. Meta called it the first cable to connect East and West Africa in a continuous system.

The consortium named by Meta is led by Meta with Bayobab (MTN Group), center3 (stc), China Mobile International, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group and WIOCC, with Bharti Airtel and MainOne, an Equinix company, joining for specific segments. Meta's post also projects that 2Africa could contribute up to 36.9 billion US dollars to Africa's GDP within its first two to three years of operation. That is a forecast by the project's lead investor, not a measured outcome.

The capacity figure depends on which segment is meant. The 2Africa project website, accessed 19 October 2026, says capacity will be up to 180 Tbps along its main trunks around Africa. Meta's post says the West segment carries 21 Tbps per fibre pair across eight trunk pairs, for up to 180 Tbps. Telecom Egypt's release of 19 November 2025 gives 168 Tbps for the West segment, which matches eight pairs at 21 Tbps, and over 180 Tbps for the Mediterranean segments, which have 16 fibre pairs. The differences are small but worth knowing: 180 Tbps is a headline for the trunks, not a single number for the whole system.

The 2Africa site says the consortium has completed landings in at least 17 countries out of a planned total of more than 33. TeleGeography's Submarine Cable Map lists these landing points in the five countries this post follows:

• South Africa: Amanzimtoti, Duynefontein, Gqeberha and Yzerfontein.
• Nigeria: Kwa Ibo and Lagos.
• Kenya: Mombasa and Mtwapa.
• Egypt: Port Said, Ras Ghareb, Suez and Zafarana. Telecom Egypt's release names Ras Ghareb on the Red Sea and Port Said on the Mediterranean.
• Morocco: none listed.

Meta's own post names Senegal, Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon, the Republic of Congo, the DRC and Angola as West segment landings, with endpoints in England and South Africa. Landing lists change as extensions are added, so anyone planning around a specific landing point should confirm with the landing party.

Equiano: the Atlantic route

Google announced Equiano in June 2019 as a cable between Portugal and South Africa, with branching units that could extend it to more African countries. Google said it would use space division multiplexing and would be the first subsea cable to switch traffic at the fibre pair level rather than the wavelength level, and that it would carry about 20 times more capacity than the last cable built to serve the region.

Google's Africa blog reported on 18 March 2022 that the cable had reached Lome, its first stop on Africa's Atlantic coast, and listed the African landing countries as Togo, Nigeria, Namibia, South Africa and St Helena. The same post quoted an economic impact assessment by Africa Practice and Genesis Analytics projecting that internet speeds in Togo would rise from 10 Mbps in 2021 to 21 Mbps in 2025, with retail prices falling 14 percent and about 37,000 jobs created indirectly. Those were forecasts made before the cable entered service.

TeleGeography lists Equiano at 15,000 km with landings at Sesimbra in Portugal, Lome, Lagos, Rupert's Bay on St Helena, Swakopmund in Namibia and Melkbosstrand in South Africa, and a ready for service date of February 2023. WIOCC, which owns a full fibre pair, says the cable has 12 fibre pairs delivering a combined 144 Tbps, 12 Tbps per pair.

Equiano matters for resilience as much as for size. Doug Madory of Kentik, writing on the APNIC blog in September 2023, said traffic was shifted to Equiano after WACS and SAT-3 failed in August 2023, and that Liquid Dataport used it to fill the gaps. Cloudflare's summary of the March 2024 cuts says Equiano reportedly saw a fourfold increase in traffic as operators moved onto it. WIOCC says it moved ISPs and IP transit providers onto its Equiano pair within a single day during a west coast outage. That is what a new cable is for. When older routes fail, spare capacity on a different path keeps traffic moving.

PEACE and Africa-1: the Egypt and Kenya link

The PEACE cable (Pakistan and East Africa Connecting Europe) landed in Mombasa at the end of March 2022, with Telkom Kenya as landing partner. In the announcement, as reported by HapaKenya on 29 March 2022, it was described as a 15,000 km cable connecting France to Pakistan, with an Indian Ocean route to Mombasa, offering 200 Gbps per wavelength and 192 Tbps of total capacity. It was the sixth submarine cable to land in Kenya, and a second phase was planned to extend the system to Singapore and southern Africa.

TeleGeography now lists PEACE at 25,000 km, owned by Peace Cable International Network Co. Ltd., with a ready for service date of March 2022. Its 14 landing points include Abu Talat and Zafarana in Egypt, Mombasa in Kenya, Bizerte in Tunisia, Marseille, Karachi and Singapore. Several branches are owned by local operators: Cyta in Cyprus, GO in Malta, Ooredoo Tunisia, Zain for a Jeddah branch, and du for a UAE branch that TeleGeography says is scheduled for completion in 2026.

Africa-1 has taken longer. Alcatel Submarine Networks built it, and when Telecom Egypt and ASN landed it at Ras Ghareb, Connecting Africa reported on 8 November 2024 that this was the third landing after Karachi and Mombasa, that the system is about 10,000 km with eight fibre pairs, and that it was scheduled for service in 2025. When Mobily landed it at Duba on Saudi Arabia's northern Red Sea coast, Capacity Media reported on 5 February 2025 a capacity of 96 Tbps and full operation expected in early 2026. TeleGeography now lists the ready for service date as 2027, still marked as planned, with owners G42, Mobily, PTCL, TeleYemen, Telecom Egypt, Zain Omantel International and e&. Its listed landings include Bejaia in Algeria, Ras Ghareb and Sidi Kerir in Egypt, Mombasa, Djibouti, Berbera and Marseille. No primary source confirms that Africa-1 is in service.

Egypt's role is geographic. Cables from Asia reach the Red Sea, cross Egyptian territory and continue to the Mediterranean and Europe. TeleGeography lists 24 cables landing in Egypt, 18 in service and 6 planned, including AAE-1, EIG, IMEWE, SeaMeWe-5, PEACE, 2Africa and TE North, which has a ready for service year of 2011. For customers the practical meaning is concentration. A large share of traffic between Europe, Africa and Asia passes through a small number of places, so a bad day in the Red Sea or at an Egyptian landing area is felt widely.

The older workhorses and the country picture

West Africa still depends on cables laid a decade or more ago. TeleGeography lists the West Africa Cable System (WACS) at 14,530 km with a ready for service date of May 2012, landing at 13 points from Seixal in Portugal and El Goro in the Canary Islands down to Yzerfontein in South Africa, including Lagos, Accra, Abidjan, Lome and Swakopmund. Its 18 listed owners include Telkom South Africa, Vodafone, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, Angola Cables and Tata Communications. ACE and the Main One cable were built around 2010 to 2012, and SAT-3/WASC dates from 2002.

TeleGeography's country pages give a useful count of what serves each market, accessed 19 October 2026:

• South Africa: 14 cables listed, including 2Africa, ACE, EASSy, Equiano, METISS, SAFE, SAT-3/WASC, SEACOM, T3 and WACS, with Umoja and ReuNION planned for 2028.
• Nigeria: 8 cables, namely 2Africa, ACE, Equiano, Glo-1, MainOne, the Nigeria Cameroon Submarine Cable System, SAT-3/WASC and WACS.
• Kenya: 9 cables, including 2Africa, DARE 1, EASSy, LION2, PEACE, SEACOM and TEAMS, with Africa-1 and Daraja planned for 2027.
• Egypt: 24 cables, as above.
• Morocco: 7 cables, including Atlas Offshore, Canalink, EllaLink, Est-Tet and Maroc Telecom West Africa, with Medusa listed at 2026 and Orient Island Ring planned for 2028.

Morocco is absent from the 2Africa list, but it is not short of routes. EllaLink connects it to Brazil and Europe, and the Maroc Telecom West Africa cable, listed with a 2021 service date, runs down the Atlantic coast. Cloudflare noted that operators shifted traffic onto that cable during the March 2024 West African cuts. Absence from one cable's landing list is not absence from connectivity.

What cuts have looked like

Three events since 2023 show the exposure.

On 6 August 2023, an undersea landslide in the Congo Canyon at the mouth of the Congo River knocked out SAT-3 and then, hours later, WACS, according to Doug Madory's analysis on the APNIC blog. South Africa was the largest affected market, and Telecom Namibia lost its transit providers. The repair ship Leon Thevenin was busy elsewhere in West Africa and had to travel to Cape Town before heading to the fault, and Madory warned that parts of the African internet could be short of bandwidth well into September. TeleGeography later recorded repair durations for those August 2023 faults off Angola and the DRC of 37 days for ACE, 43 days for SAT-3/WASC and 30 days for WACS.

On 14 March 2024, four cables were damaged on the west coast: ACE, SAT-3/WASC, WACS and MainOne. Cloudflare's same day post, citing Microsoft's Azure status page, named the four cables and said disruption began around 05:00 UTC in The Gambia, Guinea and Liberia and spread south through the morning. Cloudflare's Q1 2024 summary says 13 countries were affected: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Togo, and that Microsoft Azure and Office 365 availability was also hit. The length of disruption varied a lot. Niger, Guinea and Gambia had outages from under an hour to around two hours. Togo, Liberia and Ghana had multi day disruption, and traffic took several weeks to return to earlier peaks. Repairs were reported complete for SAT-3 by 6 April and ACE on 17 April, with WACS and MainOne expected by 28 April. TeleGeography wrote on 15 March 2024 that the precise location and cause were not yet known, while MainOne said its fault was off Cote d'Ivoire and that its initial assessment pointed to seismic activity. Cloudflare's later summary says the damage was reportedly caused by underwater rock falls.

On 24 February 2024, the Seacom/Tata, AAE-1 and EIG cables in the Red Sea were reported damaged. Cloudflare says the cause was believed to be the anchor of the Rubymar, a cargo ship damaged by a ballistic missile on 18 February, and that Seacom confirmed damage to its cable while the owners of the other two did not publish confirmations. Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique were reportedly affected, but Cloudflare Radar observed no loss of traffic in those countries.

The lesson is that the outcome depends on spare routes. In the east, networks had enough alternatives that Cloudflare saw no loss. In the west, several cables went at once, and countries with fewer alternatives suffered longest.

A later Cloudflare summary covers Red Sea damage on 6 September 2025. Pakistan Telecom said the SMW4 and IMEWE systems were affected, with the damage first reported near Jeddah and later placed in Yemeni waters. Cloudflare reported effects in Pakistan and the UAE. The post names no African country as affected and mentions Africa only as one of the regions the Red Sea cables serve, so no African impact is claimed here.

Why repair takes weeks

Faults are routine. TeleGeography's FAQ, citing the International Cable Protection Committee, puts the global figure at roughly 200 a year, with fishing vessels and dragging anchors causing about two thirds of them. Natural hazards such as earthquakes and landslides cause fewer faults, but they can break several cables at once, as the Congo Canyon events showed.

A repair needs a specialised ship. The ship has to be free, reach the site, find the cable, lift it and splice in new sections, and weather and local permits have to allow the work. The August 2023 account shows how that adds up: the nearest ship was already committed, had to sail a long distance first, and repairs then ran for 30 to 43 days per cable. The March 2024 repairs took from about three weeks to about six. For more on fault frequency, a related post, how often undersea internet cables break, covers the numbers.

Local exchange points and data centres

Cables bring traffic into the country. Exchange points and data centres decide how much of it has to travel abroad. NAPAfrica describes itself as a not for profit neutral internet exchange point located in Teraco data centres in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban, with no membership, port or cross connect fees, and lists traffic of more than 6 Tbps on its site, accessed 19 October 2026. Teraco's site reports that on 28 May 2026 NAPAfrica and ZANOG announced enhancements to community driven interconnection in Cape Town.

Teraco's site lists 228 MW of IT load across 8 locations, undated, and a Fortren and Company report, as relayed by Nairametrics on 27 July 2026, places Teraco's Isando campus at 70 MW of IT capacity and the continent's operational total at over 500 MW. The two Teraco numbers measure different things, a company total and a single campus.

Outside South Africa the picture is thinner. The ADCA and Rising Advisory report says average occupancy outside South Africa is close to one third of available capacity. Low occupancy means space exists but customers and content have not yet moved in. That is a connectivity story too. Content providers place servers where a good network and reliable power meet, and a data centre with weak network options is a hard sell.

What is firm and what is uncertain

Firm, in the sense that a primary or specialist source states it directly:

• Meta and Telecom Egypt say the core 2Africa system is complete, and the 2Africa site says it is ready for service in most landing countries.
• Equiano has 12 fibre pairs and 144 Tbps of design capacity, per WIOCC, and TeleGeography lists it in service since February 2023.
• Four west coast cables were damaged on 14 March 2024 and 13 countries were affected, according to Cloudflare.
• WACS and SAT-3 failed in August 2023 after a Congo Canyon landslide, per Kentik's analysis, with repairs lasting 30 to 43 days per cable according to TeleGeography.

Uncertain or single source:

• The exact 2Africa capacity, which varies by segment: 168 Tbps for the West segment per Telecom Egypt, up to 180 Tbps per Meta and the project site.
• When Africa-1 enters service. Its target moved from 2025 to early 2026 and is now listed by TeleGeography as 2027.
• How much of any cable is lit today, since design capacity is not usage.
• The cause of every cut. Cloudflare uses wording like reportedly and believed, and MainOne's seismic attribution was an initial assessment.
• Economic forecasts, such as Meta's 36.9 billion dollar GDP figure and the Togo projections for Equiano, which are projections rather than results.

What to watch next

• The Pearls extension of 2Africa, scheduled for 2026 per Meta and the project site.
• Confirmation that Africa-1 is in service, and whether the 2027 date in TeleGeography's listing holds.
• The du UAE branch of PEACE, which TeleGeography lists for completion in 2026.
• New cable damage, especially on the west coast and in the Red Sea, and how fast repairs finish.
• Planned systems serving Kenya and South Africa, including Daraja, Umoja and ReuNION.
• Occupancy outside South Africa, where growth in contracted capacity would signal that connectivity and power are both working.

Software teams serving African users can use Safeguard to generate SBOMs and scan dependencies, with a free scan at https://gold.safeguard.sh/scan.

Quick check

Sources

• 2Africa project website, 2Africa consortium, accessed 19 October 2026
• Connecting Africa and the World: core 2Africa system completion, Meta Engineering, 17 November 2025
• 2Africa: Building a transformative subsea cable to better connect Africa, Meta Engineering, 13 May 2020
• The Completion of 2Africa: A Consortium Milestone for Global Connectivity, Telecom Egypt, 19 November 2025
• Introducing Equiano, a subsea cable from Portugal to South Africa, Google Cloud, 29 June 2019
• The Equiano subsea cable has arrived in Togo, first stop in Africa, Google Africa blog, 18 March 2022
• WIOCC restores major ISPs and IP Transit providers on Equiano cable, WIOCC, 14 August 2024
• Telkom and PEACE Cable Company have landed a new submarine fibre cable in Kenya, HapaKenya, 29 March 2022
• Africa-1 subsea cable lands in Egypt, Connecting Africa, 8 November 2024
• Mobily lands Africa-1 subsea cable in Saudi Arabia, Capacity Media, 5 February 2025
• Submarine Cable Map data: 2Africa, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map data: Equiano, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map data: PEACE Cable, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map data: Africa-1, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map data: WACS, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map country data: South Africa, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map country data: Nigeria, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map country data: Kenya, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map country data: Egypt, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine Cable Map country data: Morocco, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• Submarine cable frequently asked questions, TeleGeography, accessed 19 October 2026
• March 2024 West Africa cable faults, TeleGeography, 15 March 2024
• Dual subsea cable cuts disrupt African Internet, Doug Madory (Kentik), APNIC Blog, 20 September 2023
• Undersea cable failures cause Internet disruptions for multiple African countries, Cloudflare, 14 March 2024
• Q1 2024 Internet disruption summary, Cloudflare, accessed 19 October 2026
• Q3 2025 Internet disruption summary, Cloudflare, accessed 19 October 2026
• NAPAfrica website, NAPAfrica, accessed 19 October 2026
• Teraco website, Teraco, accessed 19 October 2026
• Kapitalis on the ADCA and Rising Advisory report, Kapitalis, February 2026
• Africa's data centre capacity exceeds 500 MW with 890 MW in pipeline: report, Nairametrics, 27 July 2026

Last reviewed: 19 October 2026.