South-East Nigeria will soon get landing stations from the 2Africa, a consortium of sub-sea bandwidth cable which comprises China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC.
Other landing stations that will get 2Africa’s connectivity are Seychelles, the Comoros Islands and Angola, joining the recently announced extension to the Canary Islands.
With these extensions, 2Africa will be the largest subsea cable project in the world and will deliver faster, more reliable internet service to each country where it lands. Thus, improving the Internet for services in education, healthcare and business, will in turn lead to economic and social benefits for the surrounding communities.
Meanwhile, Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) has been selected to deploy the new branches, which will increase the number of 2Africa landings to 35 in 26 countries, further improving connectivity into and around Africa. As with other 2Africa cable landings, capacity will be available to service providers at carrier-neutral data centres or open-access cable landing stations on a fair and equitable basis, encouraging and supporting the development of a healthy internet ecosystem.
Since launching the 2Africa cable in May 2020, the 2Africa consortium has made considerable progress in planning and preparing for the deployment of the cable, which is expected to ‘go live’ in late 2023. Most of the subsea route survey activity is now complete. ASN has started manufacturing the cable and building repeater units in its factories in Calais and Greenwich to deploy the first segments in 2022.