Africa is currently the least-connected continent to the internet, with just over one-quarter of its 1.3 billion people online, and Facebook is looking to change that by going underwater.
The social network is teaming up with African and global telecommunications operators to build 2Africa, which represents one of the largest subsea cable projects in the world and will interconnect 23 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Europe.
Vice president of network engineering Najam Ahmad and director of network investments Kevin Salvadori said in a Newsroom post that 2Africa will be 37,000 kilometers long, nearly equal to the circumference of the Earth, and it will provide nearly three times the total network capacity of all the subsea cables currently serving Africa.
They wrote, “When completed, this new route will deliver much-needed internet capacity, redundancy and reliability across Africa; supplement a rapidly increasing demand for capacity in the Middle East; and support further growth of...
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