07 September 2023

The 2Africa fibre optic submarine cable from the eponymous consortium led by Meta has landed on the Congolese coast, according to Airtel Congo, which built the new modular landing station housing the infrastructure in Pointe-Noire.

This makes 2Africa the second international submarine cable to which the Republic of Congo connects, strengthening its national broadband infrastructure. It comes on top of the WACS (West Africa Cable System) cable to which the country connected in 2011 and on which it mainly depends for high-speed internet services.

“A single cable is not enough, the WACS will continue to operate, we will unload it and the Congo Telecom network will always be in demand. However, we need all networks, redundancy will be mandatory for operators in the sector. We are going to refuse that an operator is subscribed to only one network in order to satisfy the needs in terms of capacity and to free ourselves from any form of cut,” said Louis-Marc Sakala, DG of the Regulatory Agency Posts and Electronic Communications (ARPCE).

Once in service, the 2Africa cable should not only reduce the cost of internet services in Congo, but also extend the reach of these services to millions more people. According to the latest statistics from the regulator, the country has 3.05 million Internet users, a penetration rate of 54%.