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Facebook is building a 37,000-kilometer undersea cable to connect 23 African countries, Europe and the Middle East. The ‘2Africa’ project aims to provide the continent with better internet access.
They are not doing this alone. MTN, Orange, Vodafone and China Mobile are designated as partners on the project. Alcatel Submarine Networks, a company owned by Nokia, will build the sprawling cable network. When completed, the infrastructure will improve Africa’s current cable capacity by three folds according to Facebook’s announcement.
Facebook has had an interest in Africa’s 1.2 billion people for some time. They launched ‘Internet.org’ in 2013 as a humanitarian effort to provide internet access as a basic right in emerging markets. But that Facebook-centric scheme ran into problems as some countries accused Mark Zuckerberg of monopolistic and colonialist intentions. It could be different this time with Facebook’s broader, the cross-continental base of industry allies.
Yet, this may not dispel some of that old scepticism. After all, Facebook is building this in competition with its digital advertising arch-rival Google. The latter plans to have its 14th undersea cable run from Portugal to South Africa, with one of many landing points in Nigeria.
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