Facebook, China Mobile, and MTN Group plan to expand the 2Africa undersea cable network in Africa, bringing the total landings to 35 in 26 countries
Loni Prinsloo / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
2Africa began as a Facebook, China Mobile and partner effort to improve African internet reliability and speed through a major subsea route. The network expansion follows that original subsea-cable commitment and broadens the consortium’s planned reach to Seychelles, Comoros, Angola and Nigeria.
The landing network is only one layer of the buildout: Facebook and Liquid had already planned fiber in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that connects to 2Africa. Later coverage of MTN’s East2West proposal reinforces the importance of inland routes alongside coastal landings.
First-order effects
- Facebook, China Mobile and MTN Group enlarge 2Africa’s planned footprint to 35 landings across 26 countries, adding connection points in four named African markets.
- The added landings give the consortium more places to hand traffic from its subsea system into national and regional networks.
Second-order effects
- Liquid’s planned DRC fiber connection becomes more strategically relevant because it provides a terrestrial path into the expanded 2Africa system rather than a standalone national build.
- MTN’s subsequent East2West inland-fiber plan shows operators responding to the same network gap: subsea capacity needs cross-border terrestrial distribution to reach more markets.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points to African connectivity being built as coordinated subsea-and-inland infrastructure, with cable consortium members and regional operators jointly determining where international capacity can be distributed.
- As more landing points are paired with inland links, network advantage may shift from ownership of a single cable segment toward control of end-to-end regional routes.
The trend: African broadband infrastructure is moving from isolated coastal cable landings toward interconnected subsea and terrestrial networks spanning multiple countries.