Orange’s “life insurance” to protect the internet

More than 95% of international internet traffic travels over cables that are at the bottom of the sea. Africa and Europe start from very different positions, but they are essential to sustain essential services on both continents, such as the cloud or financial systems. Thus, while Africa It is the continent where demand grows the most bandwidth in the world and faces the problem of relatively old cables designed for much lower traffic than the current one, Europe has consolidated strategic nodes in places such as Marseille, Lisbon or the south of England, but is still exposed to the same risks of concentration and aging. Via Africa is born from both needs, the new submarine cable that Orange and an open consortium of seven operators have announced.

The Via Africa cable. Via África is a new submarine fiber optic cable that will connect southern Europe with South Africa bordering the Atlantic. It will have European connection points in the United Kingdom, France, Portugal and the Canary Islands. On the western African coast, its nodes will be in Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Ivory Coast and Nigeria, although both the final complete route and other points in southern Africa are still pending definition. In any case, The reason for this cable is improve the diversity and resilience of international communications between both continents.

Sketch of the layout. Orange

Why is it important. To start with, this cable is the answer to that veteran and undersized infrastructure of the African continent and its growing demand at a time when cloud services, artificial intelligence and teleworking are skyrocketing traffic. Furthermore, the African Atlantic coast has some critical points due to the high concentration of marine infrastructure, such as the Ivory Coast, where several cables converge in the same physical place.

This example is not coincidental: in March 2024 they failed the four cables that were there at that time at the same time due to a rockslide. The result? 13 West African countries with connectivity at minimum levels for weeks. But the problem is not only African: when these cables fail, Europe loses traffic capacity to the continent, dragging down operators, companies and cloud services that depend on that route. What Via Africa proposes is precisely a geographically different route, that is, an alternative that breaks that dependency.

Six cables, the same physical point in the Ivory Coast. Submarine Cable Map

Context. The African Atlantic coast is already served with cables such as SAT-3/WASC (2002), WACS (2012), ACE (2012), MainOne (2010) or Google’s Equiano (2023), but some of these systems are aging or have proven to be vulnerable. This new cable adds to a wave of investment in African submarine infrastructure, such as the recent 2Africa in Meta (2025) or the Medusa in the Mediterranean (2026).

Orange needs few introductions: it manages more than 450,000 kilometers of submarine cables around the world through its subsidiary Orange Marine and in fact, last year charge two new cable carrier vessels to reinforce its maintenance and deployment capacity in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, with delivery scheduled in 2028 and 2029.

How are they going to do it?. At the moment the only thing that there is closed It is a Memorandum of Understanding for its construction by a group of investors among which are CanalinkGUILAB, International Mauritania Telecom, Orange Group, Orange Côte d’Ivoire, Sonatel and Silverlinks. From here, the process starts with a route study to determine the optimal route in terms of resilience, technical feasibility and economic efficiency. Likewise, the business consortium will prepare the bidding process to select the cable manufacturer, the next step.

Yes, but. The announcement is a memorandum with big names behind it, not a construction contract, which means that the stage of the operation is extremely early: it could take years until it is operational or even never materialize. In this sense, logically there are still important unknowns pending that range from the total layout and its length, all the nodes, the manufacturer and installer and the route sheet with a date for its entry into operation or the cost.

Furthermore, Via África is going to enter a space that is not free: Google already operates Equiano on the same coastal strip and Meta has its own cable circumnavigating Africa with the very long 2Africa of 45,000 kilometers. In short, it will have to compete with the infrastructure of the large hyperscalers.

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Cover | Bryan Christie Design and Orange