Ghana has been selected among several other African countries to benefit from Facebook’s plan to build a 23,000mile-long cable to bring high-speed internet to the 1.3 billion people living on the continent.
The project, dubbed 2Africa, is expected to be completed in 2024. When completed, it will more than triple the total network capacity in Africa.
Dailymail reports that the cable has almost the same length as the circumference of the earth, and will deliver connection points to 23 countries, including Ghana, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Madagascar, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.
‘This expanded capacity will facilitate a healthy internet ecosystem by enabling greatly improved accessibility for people and businesses alike,’ Facebook wrote in a blog post announcing the project.
‘We have seen firsthand the positive impact that increased connectivity has on communities, from education to health care.’
‘We know that economies flourish when there is widely accessible internet for businesses.’
Facebook said local service providers would ‘obtain capacity in carrier-neutral data centers and open-access cable landing stations on a fair and equitable basis.’
The social media giant is hopeful the project will bring it closer to its goal of ensuring at least 80 per cent of Africa’s internet traffic is sourced from local providers.
Not only will the African continent benefit from the cable project by Facebook, but also other European countries.
The UK-based news portal, Dailymail, said the cable would also have a crossing between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean and provide improved connections in Italy and Spain.
The cables are being built by Nokia Oyj’s Alcatel Submarine Networks and will be buried deeper in the ocean floor than fibre optic cables typically are, to protect it from ship anchors and other environmental threats.
It will feature a new fiber optic technology, called Spatial Division Mutiplexing (SDM1), which promises better performance and more data than older fiber optic cable technology.
The social media giant, Facebook has not announced the cost of the cable project but Bloomberg estimates the project to cost about $1billion.
Despite 2Africa’s impressive ambitions, the record for longest undersea cable in the world still belongs to the 24,000 mile Sea-Me-We 3 cable that runs through Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, China, and Australia.
Below is the list of countries to benefit from Facebook’s cable project
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Republic of the Congo
- Ivory Coast
- Djibouti
- Egypt
- Spain
- France
- Gabon
- United Kingdom
- Ghana
- Italy
- Kenya
- Madagascar
- Mozambique
- Nigeria
- Oman
- Portugal
- Saudi Arabia
- Sudan
- Senegal
- Somalia
- Tanzania
- South Africa
- Ghanareport.com