This resource has been prepared for non-technical readers involved in data governance and digital transformation in Africa. A primer - Undersea cables for dummies - and a glossary of ICT infrastructure terms are also available.
Almost everything we do online in Africa travels through a handful of fibre-optic cables lying on the seabed. They are the physical backbone of the internet — far more important than satellites — and for most of the past two decades they were built and owned by groups of telecoms companies pooling their money together.
That is now changing. The newest and largest cables are increasingly being built and owned outright by a small number of global technology giants, who need vast amounts of capacity to power their own services. The coming generation of cables will carry many times more data than the ones they replace, and a growing share of Africa’s connectivity will run through infrastructure controlled by just a few hands.
Against that backdrop, a handful of projects stand out for keeping ownership closer to home — a question of sovereignty as much as engineering.
The fact sheet below sets out the main cables serving Africa, past, present and planned: who owns them, when they came into service, and how much they can carry. It is a snapshot of where things stand, and where they are heading.