Facebook recently announced that its 2Africa cable network will now extend to over 45,000 kilometres. This is due to the addition of nine land areas which are collectively dubbed as the 2Africa Pearls. The social media giant has announced that this subsea cable will now directly connect three major continents – Africa, Asia and Europe.
Initially announced last year, the project aims to bring better connectivity in the African continent and Middle East region. It was projected to lay down 37,000 km (22,990 miles) of cables on the ocean floor which will provide affordable internet to Africa’s population of about 1.2 billion people. Last month, they also announced that the consortium behind the project is extending the cable’s reach to four more branches in the Comoros Islands, Seychelles, Angola and the south-eastern part of Nigeria.
The latest announcement claims that the project will provide connectivity to an additional 1.8 billion people and make 2Africa the longest subsea cable system in the world upon completion. The company stated that these 3 billion individuals are across 33 countries and represent 36% of the world’s population. The extension adds landing sites in India (Mumbai), Pakistan (Karachi), UAE (Kalba and Abu Dhabi), Oman (Salalah and Barakah), Bahrain (Manamah), Qatar (Doha), Kuwait (Kuwait), Iraq (AlFaw), and in Saudi Arabia (Khobar).
The 2Africa consortium consists of Facebook, China Mobile International, Orange, MTN, Telecom Egypt, GlobalConnect, STC, Vodafone and WIOCC. Similar to the previous extensions, the consortium has selected Nokia’s Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to deploy the new nine branches. However, there is no further update on when they will be finalizing the subsea cable construction with the latest additions. Going by their previous announcements though, looks like they will maintain the set date of late 2023 to early 2024.
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