The 45 000 km 2Africa cable has landed in Yzerfontein and Duynefontein, in the Western Cape, in South Africa, as it prepares to go live in 2023.

MTN GlobalConnect, the 2Africa landing party in Duynefontein and Yzerfontein, partnered with MTN South Africa to complete the landing on South African soil.

The Yzerfontein landing will support the 2Africa West cable and the MTN South Africa landing station in Duynefontein will support the 2Africa East cable.

The cable, with a design capacity of up to 180 Tb/s on key parts of the system, is being deployed by the 2Africa consortium, which includes China Mobile International, Meta, Orange, center3, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, MTN GlobalConnect and the West Indian Ocean Cable Company.

This subsea cable will lay the foundation for improved global Internet access, connecting people and continents, from Europe, the Middle East and Asia to Africa.

It aims to deliver improved Internet capacity, reliability and performance across large parts of Africa, supplement the fast-growing capacity demand in the Middle East, and underpin the further growth of fourth-generation, fifth-generation and fixed-broadband access for millions of people.

The 2Africa landing is one of several cable landings taking place across 46 locations in 33 countries.

For MTN GlobalConnect, the South African landing is the first in a series of six across five countries, including Sudan, Cote d’Ivoire, Nigeria and Ghana.

The 2Africa subsea cable system will support the western and eastern sides of Africa, once complete in 2023 and 2024 respectively, with South African service providers able to acquire capacity in carrier-neutral data centres or open-access cable landing stations on a fair and equitable basis.

“Strategic partnerships such as the one we have with the 2Africa consortium will help us accelerate and deepen Internet adoption and socioeconomic progress across the African continent,” says MTN Group president and CEO Ralph Mupita, pointing out that data traffic across African markets is expected to grow between four and five fold over the next five years.

This requires infrastructure and capacity to meet that level of growth and demand, he continues, adding that, as part of MTN’s Ambition 2025 strategy, the company will deploy 135 000 km of proprietary fibre by 2025, generating up to $1-billion in revenue and entrenching MTN as the number one African fibre player, by building subsea and terrestrial scalable capacity and resilience.

“This cable landing adds to another milestone to the digital railroads we are building around Africa, making telecommunications accessible and available.

“The initiative complements our terrestrial fibre strategy to connect African countries to each other and to the rest of the world. We are building scale infrastructure assets to meet the explosive growth in data traffic and accelerate the digital economy on the continent, by creating a pan-African fibre railroad driving affordable connectivity,” says MTN GlobalConnect CEO Frédéric Schepens.