As of early 2025, at least 77 subsea cables were landing on the African continent, far more than a decade ago, and international bandwidth into Africa has expanded, way beyond other regions. 

Total international capacity has really grown, rising several times over since 2019, with Equiano and the Meta‑backed 2Africa among the largest new systems deployed to serve the region. 

These cables carry nearly all international internet traffic and form the backbone of digital economies across the continent. 

However, the benefits of this growth are uneven. In many places, data costs are high, national backbone networks are patchy, and digital growth slows where connectivity is weak. Bandwidth, not apps, not investment, not policy, is impacting Africa’s digital growth.

What We Mean by ‘Bandwidth’

When people speak of internet access in Africa, they usually think of mobile phones and data plans. But that’s the last mile. The real capacity that determines speed, cost and reliability comes from international bandwidth, the long, buried fibre‑optic cables under the oceans that link Africa to the rest of the world.

These subsea cables, usually hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometres long, are responsible for carrying over 95–99% of international internet traffic globally. 

The numbers are commendable:

• Africa now connects to the world via dozens of subsea cables, including legacy systems and new entrants such as Equiano and 2Africa. 
• Equiano, activated in 2023, stretches thousands of kilometres along the Atlantic coast and brings a large increase in capacity over earlier cables. 
• The 2Africa system, at around 45,000 km, is one of the largest subsea cable projects ever built and gives tremendous potential capacity around the continent. 

Cables like these determine how much data can flow into Africa, and how cheaply.

Why More Cables Don’t Automatically Mean Affordable Internet

If bandwidth is available, why is the internet still expensive in many countries?

The short answer: the cost doesn’t stop at the shore.

International bandwidth must be distributed inland via national fibre backbones. It must compete in markets where telcos may hold strong pricing power. It must overcome regulatory challenges and local infrastructure gaps.

A few facts:

• Even in well‑connected countries, data expenses relative to income are high. Affordable data in absolute terms may still be unaffordable in local purchasing power. 
• Landlocked countries depend on neighbours for subsea connections, adding complexity and expense to their Internet access. 
• National fibre networks, the kilometres of cable across cities and regions, are incomplete in many places, preventing subsea capacity from lowering prices at the user level. 

The result? You can have the world’s fastest‑growing international bandwidth market, but still pay among the highest prices per gigabyte relative to income in parts of Africa.

Connectivity and Business: The Actual Costs for SMEs

For small and medium enterprises, bandwidth affects everything:

• Customer access: slow or expensive data limits the ability to sell online or support customers in real time.
• Cloud use: tools for finance, collaboration and inventory depend on stable connections.
• Payments: digital payments are now standard, but they require reliable connectivity to avoid errors and downtime.
• Remote work: teams and contractors must connect efficiently, or productivity collapses.

These are not niche worries but core to doing business in 2026, especially with competitors in Asia and Latin America benefitting from cheaper, abundant bandwidth.

The Politics and Economics of Connectivity

Connectivity is political.

Countries that have diversified cable landings and strong national networking systems, such as Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, have an advantage. They can manage outages better, negotiate capacity pricing, and attract digital investment.

However, there are still weaknesses:

• Cable cuts due to natural events or anchor strikes have caused major disruptions in West and East Africa in recent years. Repairs are expensive and slow, and outages can knock out essential services. 
• Regulatory fees and licensing policies can slow new cable deployment or raise costs for operators. 

Meanwhile, satellite broadband services, from providers such as Starlink and similar constellations, are expanding coverage, especially in rural and underserved areas. 

Their reach is wider, but equipment prices and regulatory challenges limit their role as the core solution for mass, affordable connectivity. 

Satellite Alternatives: Real Promise, Real Limits

Satellite internet has expanded in Africa, with low‑earth‑orbit systems promising connectivity beyond fibre’s reach.

But there are limitations:

• Cost is high for most small businesses and households compared with mobile or fixed broadband. 
• Latency and reliability can be variable, especially without local ground infrastructure.
• Regulation and licensing differ country by country, slowing roll‑out.

Satellite is a useful complement, not a replacement for fibre‑optic bandwidth, not yet.

The Emerging Divide: Connected Hubs vs the Rest

The biggest danger is not a lack of cables but uneven development.

Where bandwidth is abundant and affordable, digital services grow:

• Businesses scale
• Innovation hubs form
• Educational and health services improve

Where it is scarce or costly, opportunities shrink. Growth plateaus. Digital ecosystems fail to take off.

Fixed broadband penetration in many African countries is still very low even with improving international capacity, a sign that infrastructure improvements alone are not enough without distribution, affordability and competition. 

What Actually Makes Connectivity Work

Stretching fibre under the ocean is only step one.

To boost bandwidth for growth, the following are important:

• Competitive retail markets so prices fall
• National fibre backbones so that capacity reaches businesses and towns
• Policy that welcomes investment and protects infrastructure
• Cross‑border links so landlocked countries aren’t isolated

The Bottom Line

Bandwidth is the economic input that sets the floor for digital productivity.

Africa has come far. Its subsea connections are deep and growing. The potential is enormous. But without affordable, reliable data that reaches businesses and homes, the digital economy will not live up to its projection.

In 2026, we need to treat bandwidth as core infrastructure, like power or roads, the digital vision will stay out of reach for many.

And for businesses, this gap means higher expenses, slower access to cloud services and limited ability to scale competitively.

Today, Open Access Data Centres (OADC), a WIOCC Group company, launched Open Access Fabric (OAfabric) in Nigeria (OADC Lagos) and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DRC (OADC Texaf – Kinshasa), to leapfrog these limitations and position Nigeria as Africa’s digital nerve centre.

With over 107 million internet users, Nigeria represents the continent’s largest digital market, but enterprises have long had challenges with high latency, expensive transit, and inconsistent local content access. 

The game-changing interconnection platform, OAfabric directly addresses these challenges, providing secure, low-latency connections, direct peering with global cloud providers, and integration with leading African IXPs, including IXPN in Nigeria and KINIX in the DRC.

Speaking at the launch, Dr Ayotunde Coker, chief executive officer of OADC, said “We designed OAfabric around the real challenges African businesses face. It is about solving problems – reducing the cost to compute, improving performance, unlocking access to cloud and content, and creating an environment where companies can scale with confidence while accelerating time to market.”

OAfabric is engineered to scale from 1Gbps to 100Gbps, supporting hybrid colocation architectures, AI workloads, and data-intensive applications. Traditionally, enterprises had to rely on the open internet, risking security breaches and inconsistent performance. Coker highlighted the platform’s protective advantage:

“Without OAfabric, if you want to go to the cloud, you basically have to go to the open internet. All of us understand the disadvantages of pushing your content into the open internet. Companies now have to start building layers of security, all the years of security. 

“But with OAfabric, it is a secured connection, structural cable connection from here all the way into the cloud environment, irrespective of where you are. So you are guaranteed that literally, for someone to hack, he has to use a source and come back in. It’s extremely secure connectivity.”

Resilient, Reliable, and Rapid

The platform’s resilience was demonstrated last year during a subsea cable disruption. OADC restored 2 terabytes of connectivity within 48 hours, a project that would normally take three months, stressing the network’s ability to maintain Africa’s digital backbone under extreme pressure.

Latency is dramatically reduced, a huge factor for enterprises in fintech, cloud services, and AI. Coker explained:

“We deliver a significant, well-reliable, low-latency connection. Latency between here and points in Europe, for instance, is significantly reduced. You can interconnect into Amsterdam, the UK, Marseille. We define with cloud providers exactly where we want to meet them and cross-connect very neatly, and it has a significant result on latency.”

Since 2018, OADC has expanded strategically across the continent. The Lagos data centre in Lekki currently operates at 2 megawatts, with plans to scale to 24 megawatts. 

Facilities in Kinshasa and four South African cities—Durban, Johannesburg, and Cape Town—serve as interconnection points for global subsea cables including Google Aquiano and 2Africa, creating a robust pan-African network.

Coker elaborated that “OAfabric gives us a more efficient way of delivering growth, not just in one direction, but with the capability to reverse the direction as we have more internet exchanges here, localising data. As we bring more actual cloud on-ramps into the country, we build the infrastructure for those hyperscale ramps to come here, and that’s what we’re doing.”

OAfabric aligns with Nigeria’s mega cloud policy, ensuring sensitive data remains within national borders while empowering local cloud providers to compete with international hyperscalers. It also opens the Nigerian market to foreign investment, enabling cloud edge zones and disaster recovery zones to be deployed with speed and confidence.

Head of Converged Open and Digital Infrastructure, OADC Africa, Obinna Adumike, explained the reach of OAfabric beyond Nigeria and DRC:

“OAfabric is big, and it’s here. We have a very robust connectivity network, and the biggest advantage of that is the fact that WIOCC network can connect you to any country in the world, but most especially the closest continents that Africa impacts on; Africa, Europe, America, and then within the continent, East Africa, Southern Africa and all of that. These are the regions that most of our cloud users either connect to, send, or collect traffic.”

Simplifying Complexity for Enterprises

For businesses, OAfabric transforms previously complex digital operations into seamless, manageable workflows. Coker expatiated this:

“Think of OAfabric as a box in a data centre. You connect to it, choose your pipe size—like deciding between a two-lane or four-lane highway—and your data flows efficiently to the cloud. The faster and more reliable the connection, the better the user experience.”

“OAfabric is not just infrastructure; it represents a shift in what is possible for Africa’s digital economy,” added Dr Coker. “By removing barriers and enabling seamless, high-performance peering between key ecosystems, including local and global Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), content providers, cloud platforms and enterprises, it provides the frictionless interconnection needed to access digital services more efficiently.”

With OAfabric live in Nigeria and the DRC, OADC is creating a resilient, secure, and scalable pan-African digital ecosystem, empowering enterprises, accelerating innovation, and defining a new era of African digital sovereignty.