Meta announced the completion of the construction of the main infrastructure of the 2Africa project, which implements the world’s longest submarine cable system.
Meta announced the completion of the construction of the main infrastructure of the 2Africa project, which implements the world’s longest submarine cable system.
«2Africa is a landmark submarine cable system that sets a new standard for global connectivity,» the company’s blog states .
2Africa is the first submarine cable to connect East and West Africa in a continuous system and link Africa with the Middle East, South Asia and Europe.
«With coverage in 33 countries and counting, we are connecting 3 billion people across Africa, Europe and Asia — over 30% of the world’s population. This scale is unprecedented, and we are proud to partner with stakeholders across the ecosystem to deliver a new level of connectivity at this scale,» the company added.
Meta reminds that a consortium of global partners has been created around the project, which includes, in addition to the company itself, Bayobab (MTN Group), center3 (stc), CMI, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group, and WIOCC.
Moreover, it is planned that with the commissioning of the Pearls extension in 2026, the total length of the 2Africa system, reaching 45,000 kilometers, will exceed the equivalent of the circumference of the Earth.
Meta also reports that the construction of the 2Africa project required the implementation of advanced spatial multiplexing (SDM) technology.
«This is twice the capacity of older systems. It is the first 16-pair submarine cable to fully connect Africa. We have implemented underwater optical wavelength switching, which provides flexible bandwidth management and supports the growing needs for artificial intelligence, cloud technologies and high-speed applications,» the company’s blog states.
2Africa, among other things, significantly increases the bandwidth for African countries: the cable supports 21 terabits per second per fiber pair, with 8 fiber pairs per backbone, so this provides a total backbone bandwidth of up to 180 Tbit/s.
The company says that 180 Tbps is enough to simultaneously stream over 36 million HD movies. For a single person, that means the ability to download 15,000 full-length movies per second.
2Africa is expected to contribute up to $36.9 billion to Africa’s GDP in just the first two to three years of operation.
About a year ago, we reported that Meta wanted to lay an underwater fiber optic cable around the world for $10 billion.
Meanwhile, last year it was reported that Google would build the first undersea fiber optic cable connecting Africa to Australia.
