Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Obviously the new Equiano and 2Africa cables will dramatically improve African network reliabilty. In fact, Equiano provided a huge amount of restoration capacity for Internet backbones that lost European connectivity during the four cable outage off Abidjan this past spring. As long as the network operator could get their traffic to Lagos or South Africa, they could get hop onto Equiano and reach Europe.  Long term there are two primary ways to create a more resilient pan-African network. The Continent needs large fibre optic interstate highways connecting countries. The challenge is that most landlocked African states have not truly liberalized their markets to allow internal competition, foreign ownership or even cross border fibre ownership. Landline monopoly is the rule in these countries. For example, today, the only way to link Burkino Faso fibre to its Ivory Coast counterpart is via a border cross connect. There is no cross border fibre ownership permitted. This is a serious dr