West Africa’s internet leans on a handful of coastal cable landing stations, and when one is cut, the region feels it. CSquared is trying to spread that risk.
The wholesale infrastructure company said on 13 July 2026 that it had activated capacity on the 2Africa West submarine cable, adding a new international route to strengthen connectivity and resilience across West and Central Africa.
The new capacity sits alongside the Equiano system, which lands in Nigeria, Togo, Ghana, Benin and Burkina Faso, and a terrestrial backbone linking Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia. Together, they give operators more than one way in and out of the region.
Why route diversity matters
The problem is concentration. Much of West Africa’s international traffic funnels through cable landing stations at Accra, Lagos and Abidjan, so damage to a single system can ripple across borders. Subsea cable cuts near Cote d’Ivoire in March 2024 knocked out connectivity across the region, and further cuts in June 2026 repeated the disruption, sharpening the case for diversified routing.
“Operators across West Africa are scaling rapidly and require access to diverse international routes,” said Ian Paterson, chief executive of CSquared. Chief technology officer Samuel Owusu Yeboah added that “digital services, cloud platforms and mobile networks depend on resilient international connectivity”.
CSquared operates networks in Uganda, Ghana, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Togo, with points of presence in Nigeria, South Africa and Portugal. The move adds to a run of investment aimed at hardening the continent’s links to the outside world, from new transatlantic routes to fresh subsea landings, as Africa’s digital economy grows less willing to tolerate a single point of failure.
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