While Google’s new Umoja submarine fibre cable certainly won’t be anywhere near the longest in the world – that accolade belongs to Meta’s 45 000 km-long 2Africa cable – it will be one of Africa’s most important, linking as it does the continent to Australia for the first time, offering much-needed redundancy. While the exact length of Umoja has not yet been revealed, it will traverse 8 000 km, as the crow flies, between Perth and the eastern seaboard of South Africa.

There is also an important terrestrial component that has already gone live. It stretches from South Africa all the way to Mombasa, Kenya, passing through Zimbabwe, Zambia, DRC, Rwanda and Uganda in East Africa. Together with its sister subsea cable, Equiano, Umoja is part of Google’s Africa Connect initiative and will enable African countries to more reliably connect with each other and the rest of the world.

The May 2024 announcement of Umoja – the Swahili word for ‘unity’ – came at a propitious time. The region was still reeling from a major outage on 12 May, when two subsea cables – SEACOM and the East African Submarine System – were damaged off the coast of KwaZulu-Natal, by a suspected dragged anchor.

Globally, outages happen all the time and traffic is rerouted seamlessly, but the damage on 12 May stalled a huge portion of the region’s internet traffic. US non-profit group the Internet Society reported that among the countries most affected were Burundi, Malawi, Mozambique, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, which all relied on the two cable systems to access hyperscale cloud services in South Africa.

Internet users in Uganda, for example, reported having difficulty in accessing social media and e-learning resources, while Tanzania’s access was reduced to a dribble.

The 12 May event was preceded by two other major outages. The first one, in East Africa in February 2024, saw the SEACOM, Asia-Africa-Europe 1 and the Europe India Gateway systems being severed in the Red Sea. Then, on 14 March, on the other side of the continent, an undersea avalanche off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire damaged four cable systems almost simultaneously – West Africa Cable System, MainOne, South Atlantic 3 and the Africa Coast to Europe.

The incident affected 13 African countries – from Gambia all the way down to South Africa – causing either degraded services or near-total internet outages. Microsoft reported outages of its services on 14 March, and even countries that were not directly affected by the cable outage could not use services such as Microsoft Teams and Office365.

‘With only three of the 10 undersea cables that connect South Africa to the world still in operation, it is quite remarkable that the region remains as well connected as it is,’ Edward Lawrence, co-founder of IP transit service provider Workonline Group, remarked after the outage. ‘The cable breaks on both sides of the continent have highlighted the issue of the lack of capacity to support Africa’s burgeoning internet requirements. There are 574 active and planned submarine cables across the globe, yet South Africa only has 10 that connect it to the rest of the world, and seven of these are currently out of action.’

That internet service was restored relatively quickly to some regions is thanks largely to the redundancy offered by the Google-funded Equiano cable, which lies further offshore of Côte d’Ivoire and was not affected by the avalanche. The cable, which came into service in 2022, reportedly saw a fourfold increase in traffic after the outage, as service providers scrambled to find alternative networking routes.

A report on the West Africa cable outage by the Internet Society noted that the outage emphasised ‘the importance of having upstream redundancy, whether it be submarine or terrestrial cables, satellite and/or more locally cached content, and IXPs [internet exchange points] allowing local internet connectivity to continue when connections to the outside world are broken’.

Thanks to the benefits of subsea cabling – reduction in latency, increased bandwidth and lower internet costs – e-commerce platforms have flourished in Africa as have e-learning, telemedicine and online government services. In addition, the impact on science and innovation can be enormous.

Take, for example, South Africa’s Square Kilometre Array radio telescope project in the Northern Cape. It will rely on the South Atlantic Cable System, linking Angola and Brazil, to transfer big data to its science partners around the world. Africa’s growing fintech industry, which may not be the world’s biggest, but is the fastest-growing (projected to be worth US$65 billion by 2030), would not be where it is without subsea cabling infrastructure.

The irony is that as Africa’s reliance on the cloud and other services facilitated by subsea cabling grows, so does its vulnerability

‘Umoja is a game changer for East Africa and will lower the latency of especially Uganda, Rwanda and the eastern DRC, giving them direct access to important content in South Africa,’ according to Ben Roberts, former chief information technology officer for Liquid Technologies, which is an investor in Umoja. ‘This will dramatically improve the way we build our networks in Africa and reduce our reliance on subsea capacity for that important Intra Africa “Cape to Cairo” connectivity that we have pioneered.’

Scheduled to come online by the end of 2024, Meta’s 2Africa cable, which almost encircles Africa linking it to Europe and Asia with 48 landings, is said to be more secure than its contemporaries. Its burial depth is about 50% greater, at 3m below the surface, meaning it will not be subjected to accidental anchor drags. It is also one of the first of its size to make use of a new aluminium conductor, facilitating a much lower cable voltage drop to accommodate more fibre pairs per cable.

A study by RTI International describes 2Africa ‘as the single-largest step change in international bandwidth in the continent’s history’, adding that it will contribute a 0.42% to 0.58% impact to Africa’s economy within its first two to three years of operation – equivalent to US$26.4 billion to US$36.9 billion at purchasing power parity.

‘2Africa is one factor that can mitigate headwinds by furthering connectivity and thereby making Africa’s economy more nimble, resilient and prepared to grow in the face of uncertain global conditions.’

David Eurin, CEO of Liquid Dataport, an investor in 2Africa, told ITWeb that the 2Africa system will stimulate growth of 4G, 5G and fixed broadband access for ‘hundreds of millions of people on the continent – with its ripple effect expected to boost job creation across several sectors in SA, including software development, internet connectivity and data centres’.

Equiano, meanwhile, provides African businesses with access to fibre internet with latency speeds of about 110 ms between the continent and Europe and up to 20 times more network capacity. In addition, its pioneering optical switching technology will make it much easier to allocate the capacity of the cable and route data traffic to different locations as needed.

However, while connectivity to subsea cables is important, investment in establishing internet exchange points and local caching servers is equally important to ensure the resilience of Africa’s internet.

By Robyn Leary
Images: Gallo/Getty Images