China Mobile International, Facebook, MTN Global Connect, Orange, stc, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone and WIOCC today announced their partnership to build 2Africa, one of the world’s largest subsea cable projects that will connect 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
At 37,000km long, the cable will interconnect Europe (eastward via Egypt), the Middle East (via Saudi Arabia) and 21 landing points in 16 African countries. With a design capacity of over 180Tbps on key parts of the system, 2Africa will deliver much-needed internet capacity and network resilience across large parts of Africa and underpin the further growth of 4G, 5G and fixed broadband access for millions of people.
WIOCC CEO, Chris Wood, commented, “For over a decade WIOCC has been the hyperscale capacity provider for Africa, based upon a policy of ongoing strategic investment in key subsea and terrestrial infrastructure. Participation in 2Africa continues this commitment to providing large capacity users with the resilient network they need to support their customers’ ever-growing bandwidth requirements. Our investment both future-proofs our network capabilities and provides additional resilience to maximise uptime for our critical infrastructure.”
WIOCC is a pioneer in developing and seamlessly integrating subsea and terrestrial systems in Africa to meet the demands of the wholesale market. This investment will maintain our position as one of the largest providers of capacity on the continent, as well as reinforcing our strategic approach to building reliable, resilient and truly hyperscale network infrastructure.
