2Africa

2Africa is a 45,000-kilometre submarine cable system that encircles the African continent and extends into the Middle East and Europe. At the time of its completion in 2024, it became the longest submarine cable ever built — by a margin of several thousand kilometres — and it remains the largest single system by landing count, with 46 landings across 33 countries. It is Meta-led, operates on 16 fibre pairs at a design capacity of 180 Tbps, and was explicitly designed to do something no prior cable had attempted: wrap an entire continent in a single continuous fibre ring.

A cable that encircles a continent

The design of 2Africa is audacious. Most submarine cables run between two or three major regions — Europe to North America, Asia to the US West Coast, Europe to India. 2Africa instead circumnavigates Africa, entering the Mediterranean at Marseille and Genoa, transiting the Red Sea via Egypt (three Egyptian landings: Port Said, Ras Ghareb, Zafarana), crossing the Arabian Sea via Oman and Pakistan, reaching India at Mumbai, and then running down the East African coast — Kenya (Mombasa, Mtwapa), Mozambique (Maputo, Nacala), Madagascar, South Africa — before rounding the Cape and coming back up the West African coast through Angola, Congo, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, before landing in Portugal and Spain. A single continuous cable body. Every African coastal country that chose to participate has a landing.

Eight owners, one goal

2Africa's ownership is split eight ways. Meta (Facebook) is the largest investor and the project's coordinator, though its share does not exceed 25%. The other seven owners — Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and center3 (a Saudi Arabian data infrastructure company) — each bring regional expertise and local landing rights. This is a hybrid of the hyperscaler and consortium models. Meta provides the financial and technical muscle; the carriers provide access to national telecommunications markets across the cable's footprint. Neither could have built this cable alone: Meta could not have negotiated 33 separate national telecommunications concessions, and no consortium of carriers could have raised the capital to fund 45,000 km of fibre.

The Chinese participation is notable. China Mobile is the only Chinese-state-aligned owner on the cable. Compare with PEACE (a rival pan-African cable owned by Peace Cable International, which is Chinese-aligned) and Huawei Marine Networks. The decision to include China Mobile as a minor partner on 2Africa reflects a geopolitical balance: Meta and its European partners cannot fully exclude Chinese carrier interests from African markets where China Mobile has long-standing commercial relationships, and so a minority stake was preferable to direct competition with a rival Chinese-majority cable.

Our measurements

We monitor 2Africa primarily between Gqeberha (Port Elizabeth), South Africa and Bude, United Kingdom — a connection running down the east coast of Africa, around the Cape, up the west coast, and terminating in Cornwall. Over 30 days we have 45 clean samples in this direction:

The Gqeberha → Bude results are striking. A 27.9-ms minimum and 76.9-ms average on what should be an 11,000-kilometre great-circle path indicate that our measurements are reaching targets closer than the nominal cable endpoint. The likely explanation is that 2Africa's landing stations have internal IP infrastructure that responds to pings at the landing point itself, rather than forcing our packets all the way through the fibre to Bude. The average of 77 ms at a baseline of 68 ms (ratio 0.99 — stable) represents traffic that actually traverses the full cable body from South Africa to the UK. Either interpretation shows the cable is operational and not facing capacity problems.

The Abidjan → Sydney path is an unusual one — 2Africa connects West Africa to Europe and onward to Asia via the Suez Canal and Indian Ocean. Traffic from Abidjan to Sydney therefore makes a long detour through Marseille → Mumbai → Singapore → Sydney, landing at around 229 ms on average. This is not 2Africa's optimal use; the cable is not a direct Africa-Oceania system.

The Red Sea problem

2Africa's most exposed segment is its Red Sea crossing. Three Egyptian landings (Port Said, Ras Ghareb, Zafarana) keep the cable ashore in Egypt for its entire north-south Red Sea traversal, connecting it via short land-based fibre links between Mediterranean and Red Sea coasts rather than routing the entire length of cable through the narrow channel. This design decision reflects a hard-won lesson from a decade of Red Sea cable faults: cables that cross the Red Sea by water are exposed to anchor strikes, sabotage, and geological events at chokepoints where they share seabed with 20+ other cables. 2Africa minimises the Red Sea water crossing by bringing the cable ashore and running it overland through Egyptian fibre for most of the inland portion.

Not all operators made this choice. Older cables that transit the Red Sea entirely by water have faced repeated outages — the 2024 Houthi attacks on Yemeni-coastal cables in the southern Red Sea being the most publicised example. 2Africa's land-bridge architecture in Egypt puts the cable behind Egyptian sovereign territorial protection for a critical stretch of the route, reducing the sabotage exposure by an order of magnitude.

What 2Africa changes

Before 2Africa, most African internet traffic to non-African destinations routed through Europe — and even much intra-African traffic did the same, because there were not enough coast-to-coast African fibre paths to carry all regional flows directly. 2Africa changes this at scale. A packet from Accra to Nairobi no longer has to detour through Marseille or London; it can take 2Africa along the African coast, via a shared ring that includes its own transit capacity for carrier customers. For Meta's services — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — this means Africa-to-Africa traffic no longer crosses two additional intercontinental cables to get there.

For African carriers, 2Africa is a capacity injection without historical precedent. Before 2024, total international cable capacity to Africa was on the order of 60 Tbps; 2Africa alone adds another 180 Tbps, tripling the continent's international bandwidth. The market has not yet fully adjusted — African carriers are still pricing transit at pre-2Africa rates in many regions — but over the next five years the effect will be visible as broadband costs fall and data centres migrate closer to landing stations. Cape Town, Lagos, Nairobi, and Cairo all become more attractive locations for cloud workloads, regional caches, and content origin.

Try it yourself

Live latency data on the 2Africa cable page. For context see Medusa (a 2026 Mediterranean cable that complements 2Africa in the North African corridor) and Maroc Telecom West Africa (a single-owner cable on the West African coast that 2Africa both competes with and interconnects through). Our measurements refresh every two hours.