Africa's submarine cables
69 submarine cables connect Africa to the rest of the internet, and the biggest new ones are built by the companies whose traffic fills them; six coastal states still hang on a single cable.
- 69
- cables in service with a landing in Africa (three of them in lakes), 394 thousand km long counting each system's full length; 12 more planned (TeleGeography, with the register's corrections)
- 1,500×
- 2Africa's design capacity against SAT-3's up to 180 Tbps on 2Africa's western trunk against SAT-3's 120 Gbps at its opening, as published
- 6
- coastal states with one cable all on ACE: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, Sierra Leone and The Gambia
- 7
- cables cut off Africa in 2024 in the three incidents whose cause was reported (SEACOM twice); the four off Abidjan broke at one point and disrupted 13 countries
Egypt, the land bridge between Europe and Asia, has 17 in service and Djibouti, at the mouth of the Red Sea, 8; South Africa has 11. Meta's 2Africa and Google's Equiano, in service since 2023–24, were each designed to carry more than a thousand times what SAT-3, the west coast's consortium cable, could when it opened a quarter-century ago. In 2024 seven cables broke off Africa's coasts, most probably to a drifting ship's anchor in the Red Sea, an undersea landslide off Abidjan and a dragged anchor off KwaZulu-Natal, and repairs took weeks to months, held up by permits in the Red Sea and by distance elsewhere: only one repair ship is stationed south of the Sahara, at Cape Town. Twelve more systems are planned to land, four of them Meta's or Google's.
Register compiled 31 Oct 2026 from 228 sources · cables from TeleGeography, 14 Oct 2026 · lenders from the site's IATI and AidData layers · images from Sentinel-2 to 28 Oct 2026