Facebook extends submarine cable to Africa and includes direct connection to Angola

Tech giant Facebook announced today that it will extend the submarine cable in Africa with direct connections to Angola, Nigeria, Seychelles and Comoros, seeking to increase the speed of Internet on the continent.

According to financial information agency Bloomberg, Facebook, Chinese telecommunications company China Mobile and the MTN Group will build a more comprehensive undersea cable than initially planned, which joins the recently announced link to the Canary Islands, bringing a direct connection to 35 countries instead of the 26 initially announced.

“Facebook's significant investment in 2Africa takes advantage of other investments we've made across the continent, including infrastructure investments in South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of Congo [DRCongo],” according to a company statement quoted. by Bloomberg.

Technological companies Facebook and Alphabet, which owns Google, support 80% of the most recent investments in transatlantic connections, seeking to take advantage of the growing demand for fast data transfer that is used in all segments, from medical consultations to the transmission of movies or exchange of messages on social networks.

Investments in recent years, amounting to nearly 1 billion dollars (850 billion euros), follow on from the 20 billion dollars (17 billion euros) invested by telephone companies in submarine fiber optic networks as a result. the strong expansion of technology companies in the 1990s.

The production of the first segments of this underwater infrastructure has already started in the United States of America, and will include a cable with 37,000 kilometers to connect Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

The 2Africa link is expected to be operational in 2024 and will guarantee more than the current capacity of all the cables that serve the African continent, the statement added by the financial information agency added.