The Cable That Could End West Africa's Outage Cycle

Orange leads a seven-operator consortium signing an MoU to build a 20,000km Atlantic subsea cable targeting West Africa's chronic outage risk

26 May 2026

Signed in Nairobi on 12 May 2026, the Via Africa cable project is no quiet industry announcement. Seven operators, led by Orange, have committed to building a roughly 20,000-kilometre submarine cable along Africa's Atlantic coast, linking Europe to South Africa while deliberately sidestepping the congested corridors that have left West African markets exposed to cascading outages. French President Emmanuel Macron was in the room when it was announced. That alone signals how far beyond fibre optics this project reaches.

The core problem is structural. West Africa's existing subsea systems share overlapping routes, a flaw that has repeatedly turned single cable faults into multi-country blackouts. TeleGeography data shows more than half of Africa's international bandwidth flows through just five countries. Via Africa is designed specifically to break that chokehold.

Planned landings stretch from the UK, France, and Portugal down the Atlantic coast through Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria, eventually terminating in South Africa. Orange Wholesale CEO Michaël Trabbia put the design logic plainly: the more routes diverge, the fewer single points of failure remain. Consortium governance is still forming, and the project remains open to new members, including cloud operators and hyperscalers.

Construction is years out. Phase one covers jointly financed route studies, followed by supplier procurement, with Orange estimating three to four years from finalised arrangements to completion. The timeline is real, but so is the demand driving it.

Alongside the cable announcement, Orange pledged to train three million young Africans in AI, cybersecurity, and cloud skills by 2030. From the ocean floor to the skills gap, the infrastructure ambition is consistent. Getting there, though, depends on governance complexity not swamping the momentum this launch has built.