Hamilton Research, based in the UK, annually releases a map of Africa’s ever-expanding telecommunications networks. The 2013/2014 Africa Telecom Transmission Map, sponsored by Liquid Telecom, shows in great detail nearly all submarine cables, landing stations, and national fibre backbones that service Africa.

{Hamilton Research 2013, www.africabandwidthmaps.com}

It is clear from the freely available version that coastal and urban areas have the highest density of fibre networks. Few connect North African with Sub-Saharan Africa or West Africa with East Africa. Bandwidth is less obvious from this view, but a brief synopsis gives plenty of promising information:

• Bandwidth increased by 84% year-over-year to reach 1.479 Tbps in 2012
• Bandwidth tripled between 2010-2012 and grew fifteen-fold since 2008
• Sub-Saharan African networks saw the most growth (127%) with North Africa increasing bandwidth by 50%
• Geographically, North African capacity (658 Gbps) is much greater than SSA’s capacity (821 Gbps)
• 16 submarine cables serving SSA have the capability of providing 25.8 Tbps
• Kenya used 328 Gbps in December 2012
• The increase of cross-border terrestrial network bandwidth was 4x in the past year
• An additional 25 million people across SSA were brought within 25km of a fibre node in 2012 (6.5 million submarine landing point, 18.5 million terrestrial node)
• 371 million people in SSA are within 25km of an operational fibre network and 187.5 million are within 10km

{Hamilton Research 2013}