Medusa, the submarine cable backed by the AFR-IX Telecom group and that interconnects southern Europe, northern Africa, the Middle East and West Africa through the Mediterranean, will have a new mooring in Equatorial Guinea, following the agreement signed between the government of said country and those responsible for the infrastructure.
In this way, The country thus joins a cable that offers high-capacity transmission, greater network redundancy and lower latency, which allows us to satisfy the rapidly growing demand for digital services, both in Equatorial Guinea and throughout the subregion.
It will be the second submarine cable in the area, after the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) cable. operational since December 2012 which has 17,000 kilometers of fiber optics to connect 19 countries along the west African coast, from France and Portugal to South Africa.
In total, and according to TeleGeography’s Africa Telecommunications Map 2025, there are currently 77 cable systems connected to the African continent, either in service or under construction. In November 2025, Meta announced the completion of the core infrastructure of 2Africa, the world’s longest open cable system at 45,000 kilometres. The system, backed by a consortium including MTN GlobalConnect, Vodacom/Vodafone, Orange, China Mobile International and others, connects 33 countries and is designed to serve more than 3 billion people.
More than connectivity
These submarine cables are of vital importance for any territory and even more so for a continent like Africa. To give us an idea, Before the ACE came into service, the countries’ international transmission capacity was practically residual. Now, and thanks to these systems, This connectivity capacity has been multiplied to exceed 30 Gbps, and The cost of a megabit per second has plummeted (going in some cases from costing around $4,000 to less than $5 per month).
The problem, beyond bandwidth, is the vulnerability of these countries, since depending on a single cable means that any breakdown in that system can leave the entire country without an international connection. In fact, in March 2024, several simultaneous failures in four systems (WACS, ACE, SAT-3 and MainOne) left much of West and Central Africa without internet for hours, leading the Ghana National Telecommunications Authority to publicly confirm “a significant degradation of data services throughout the country.” In January 2026, a technical failure in the WACS cable interrupted internet access in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It should be noted that Medusa has the financial support of the European Union (which contributed 14.3 million euros for its African extension). In fact, this cable has its origins in a Mediterranean one that began to be formally deployed in October 2025, when its first segment docked in Marseille. Designed with up to 24 fiber pairs and a design capacity of 480 terabits per second, It connects southern Europe with northern Africa and, through its sub-Saharan extension, branches towards the Atlantic. Construction is carried out by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN).
In the case of Equatorial Guinea, the arrival of the cable is scheduled for the period 2029-2030 and the connection cost is estimated between 20 and 60 million euros, subject to the validation of additional maritime studies. In addition, the country also wants to join Via Africa, an initiative promoted by a consortium of seven operators that on May 12, 2026 signed a Memorandum of Understanding for its development. The project plans to connect Europe with South Africa along the Atlantic coast, with mooring points in the United Kingdom, France, Portugal, the Canary Islands, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Nigeria. The consortium has started a route study to determine the optimal route and is preparing the bidding process to select the cable provider.
Via Africa is specifically designed as a complementary infrastructure, whose reason for being is provide a different underwater route than existing cables such as 2Africa, Equiano and Medusa Africa itself.
However, and despite the number of cables that surround the continent, internet penetration in the population remains low. In 2023, only 34% of Africans used the internet, compared to the 66% global average, according to the International Telecommunication Union. Among the causes of this low rate we can talk about the lack of internal fiber optic networks that carry the signal from coastal mooring stations to inland cities, access costs or availability of electricity, among others.