e& Carrier & Wholesale Services (C&WS), the international wholesale arm of global technology group e&, announced earlier this month, the successful landing and integration of the 2Africa submarine cable system at its carrier neutral SmartHub data centre in the UAE.
Spanning approximately 45,000 kilometres, 2Africa is the world’s largest submarine cable system, connecting Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, and plays a vital role in meeting the region’s rapidly increasing international bandwidth requirements.
Nabil Baccouche, Group Chief Carrier & Wholesale Officer, e&, said, “The successful landing and integration of 2Africa is a strategic achievement that reinforces e&’s role as a trusted global connectivity partner. By bringing this system into service in the UAE, we are strengthening international resilience and enabling our partners and customers to scale with confidence as demand for high-capacity, low-latency connectivity continues to grow.”
The landing of this state-of-the-art subsea cable aims to enhance network capacity, resilience, and latency performance, supporting the growing demand for data, cloud services, and digital transformation across the UAE and beyond. By diversifying international routes, the 2Africa system ensures more reliable and seamless connectivity for carriers, content providers, enterprises, and consumers.
2Africa took nearly six years to build, spanning 50 jurisdictions and requiring constant adaptation to dynamic regulatory landscapes. The consortium behind it comprises global tech giants such as Meta, Bayobab which is a pan-African digital connectivity solutions company, center3 which is a Middle Eastern data center provider, China Mobile International Limited (CMI), Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone Group, among others.
