Africa-1

Africa-1 is a 10,000 km submarine cable ready for service in 2026, running from France through Africa to the Middle East. It lands in ten stations across nine countries: Marseille in France, Bejaia in Algeria, Sidi Kerir in Egypt, Duba in Saudi Arabia, Al Hudaydah in Yemen, Djibouti City in Djibouti, Berbera in Somalia, Mombasa in Kenya, Kalba in the UAE, and Karachi in Pakistan. The cable is owned by a consortium anchored around Africa's major telecom operators — MTN GlobalConnect, Telecom Egypt, Orange, and others — and represents one of the most significant new African-led submarine cable investments of the 2020s.

Africa-1's name is deliberately emblematic. It is one of a handful of cables that build an African-owned backbone into global connectivity rather than serving African landings as secondary endpoints on cables owned elsewhere. The previous generation of West and East African cables (WACS, EASSy, SACS) mixed African and non-African ownership; Africa-1 is centred on African operators as principal partners.

138 ms Kenya to France

Our monitor measures Africa-1 between Mombasa in Kenya and Marseille in France. Over 30 days we collected 28 samples in the forward direction, and something interesting happened mid-measurement window:

Starting around April 10, measurements to a different French endpoint began arriving at 138.2 ms — approximately 44 ms faster than the earlier 182.3 ms baseline. Same cable (still Africa-1), same Mombasa origin, same monitored direction. What changed was the French-side target that our target-selection logic promoted to the primary measurement.

Light in submarine fibre has a theoretical minimum round-trip of 97.8 ms for a 10,000 km cable. The 138.2 ms minimum corresponds to about 14,100 km of fibre — consistent with the cable's full length after accounting for the Marseille-endpoint backhaul. The earlier 182.3 ms minimum corresponds to about 18,600 km, suggesting that target was reached via a longer path involving additional European backhaul or peering handoffs.

For a cable in its first year of service, seeing production routing adjust to expose the shorter path is expected. Carriers take time to migrate traffic and optimise peering on new cables, and the 44 ms gap between the two targets reflects the ongoing handoff of routing policy as Africa-1 establishes itself in production topology.

Ten landings, nine countries

The route is a mirror of SEA-ME-WE and similar Europe-Asia-via-Africa cables, but with noticeably more African coast coverage. Algeria, Egypt, Djibouti, Somalia, and Kenya all get direct landings; by comparison, a typical Europe-Asia cable might land only in Djibouti and Egypt on the African side, treating those countries as transit stops rather than primary customers.

Three landings deserve specific attention:

Al Hudaydah, Yemen, is one of the most challenging landing stations to operate in the contemporary global cable network. Yemen has experienced significant conflict disruption over the past decade, and cable operations through Yemeni waters have required careful coordination with multiple authorities. Africa-1's commitment to a Yemeni landing — rather than bypassing Yemen entirely as some competitors have done — reflects a long-term bet on the country's eventual reintegration into global telecom markets.

Berbera, Somalia, is a landing we have encountered before on PEACE Cable. Berbera is in Somaliland, an autonomous region that declared independence but is not internationally recognised as a separate state. The landing station exists and provides meaningful international connectivity to Somaliland's telecoms; Africa-1's decision to land there follows the precedent PEACE set.

Bejaia, Algeria, is a notable landing because Algerian international cable connectivity has historically been sparse. A direct Europe-to-Algeria fibre pair on Africa-1 gives Algerian operators a higher-capacity and lower-latency option than the previous generation of North African cables.

African-led ownership

Africa-1's consortium reflects a shift in who pays for African submarine connectivity. Historically, African cable ownership was dominated by European telecoms (Orange, Vodafone, British Telecom, Cable & Wireless) with African partners holding minority stakes. A packet on SEA-ME-WE 4 travelling from Europe to Nigeria would cross capacity commercially controlled by European owners, with African operators paying transit for their share.

Africa-1's consortium anchor is MTN GlobalConnect, a Pan-African wholesale arm of MTN Group, which operates mobile networks across 19 African countries. Other African principals include Telecom Egypt (one of the largest cable owners in the region), Zain Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti Telecom. European and American telecoms participate as minority partners rather than principal sponsors.

This matters because the ownership determines who sets the commercial terms for capacity on the cable. When an African operator wants to add capacity on Africa-1, it negotiates with other African operators. When the same operator wanted to add capacity on older cables, the primary negotiating counterparty was in Paris or London. The practical outcome is more flexible African wholesale pricing and faster decision-making on capacity changes.

Red Sea vulnerability

Africa-1 traverses the Red Sea and exits through the Bab-el-Mandeb strait — the same corridor as EIG, PEACE, SEA-ME-WE 6, and most other Europe-to-Asia cables. Cable faults in this region affected multiple systems during 2024, and the dependency is structural: there is no alternative maritime path from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean for cables of this scale.

Africa-1 does not solve the Red Sea problem. It adds capacity through the same corridor. What it provides is redundancy — if one cable faults, traffic can reroute onto another in the same corridor with minimal delay, as long as enough cables are running simultaneously. The collective resilience of the European-Asian internet increasingly depends on the aggregate capacity of all the cables sharing this corridor, rather than on any one of them.

What our data proves

• Africa-1 delivers Mombasa → Marseille at 138.2 ms on the most recent measurements, 1.41× the physics floor for 10,000 km. A clean number for a cable in its first year of service.
• Routing policy is still being optimised. The shift from 182 ms to 138 ms mid-measurement window reflects production traffic migrating onto the cable as carriers update their peering.
• African-led consortium ownership is operational. Africa-1 is one of the first major cables where African telecoms are principal owners rather than secondary partners — and it is delivering the performance its builders committed to.

Africa-1 is part of a generational shift in African submarine infrastructure from passive participant to primary sponsor. Our 2026 measurements capture the first year of what is likely to be a 25-year primary service life. The interesting question for the next decade is not whether Africa-1 works — it clearly does — but how the African-led ownership model reshapes wholesale capacity pricing across the continent.

Try it yourself

Live data on the Africa-1 cable page. Compare with other African cables: Equiano (2022, Google, Portugal–South Africa), EASSy (2010, East African coast), and WACS (2012, West African coast).