Facebook lays undersea internet cable around Africa with partners

Facebook, Vodafone and other companies are working on the 2Africa project. The companies will lay a submarine internet cable around the continent, connecting countries in Africa with countries in Europe and the Middle East.

2Africa is a project of China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC. In total, 2Africa has to connect 23 countries. These are mainly African countries on the coast of the continent, but Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and the United Kingdom will also be connected.

The aim is to give African countries a faster and more stable internet connection and the cable must also provide redundancy. Africa is said to be the least internet-connected continent; only a quarter of the population of 1.3 billion people has an internet connection. The cable must be ready in 2023 or 2024 and then offer a capacity of up to 180Tbit/s.

In the past, African regions have experienced internet disruptions due to cable breaks. To avoid this, the 2Africa cable is buried deeper, up to three meters, avoiding areas known for submarine disturbances. For the cable itself, aluminum has been used instead of copper for the conduction and spatial division multiplexing is used. According to Facebook, the use of aluminum entails lower costs and this would also lead to less voltage loss, so that the number of fiber pairs can be increased to sixteen.

Facebook hopes to piggyback on and contribute to the expected growth of Internet use in Africa. The company is not alone in this. Google announced a similar project last year. That cable runs from Portugal to South Africa and should be laid from 2021.