Africa’s Fiber Optic Push Is Real — But the Hard Work Starts at the Last Mile

The numbers look encouraging on paper. Africa’s operational fiber-optic network has grown from roughly 466,000 kilometres in 2010 to 1.3 million kilometres in 2024, a period during which the share of the population with internet access roughly quadrupled.

Subsea cables ring the continent, bilateral agreements multiply, and tech companies from Google to Meta have staked significant capital on African connectivity. Yet for all that progress, the promise of fiber remains stubbornly out of reach for hundreds of millions of Africans, not because the cables don’t exist, but because they stop too far from the people who need them.

Understanding this gap between infrastructure laid and infrastructure used is essential to reading the current moment honestly.

A Continent Wiring Itself Up

The momentum behind fiber expansion on the continent is real. Rollouts are building on new subsea cables that link the continent to the rest of the world, with high-speed networks being extended from coastal landing sites into landlocked countries. The 2Africa subsea cable project, the largest such initiative to ring the entire African continent with a 23,000-mile-long high-speed cable, includes 21 landings in 16 African nations and is designed to double the continent’s total internet capacity.

On the terrestrial side, South Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria are leading the expansion of fiber optic networks, with major telecoms players like Liquid Telecom, Telkom South Africa, MTN Group, and Vodacom Group investing heavily in both urban and rural areas. South Africa, in particular, has pulled ahead of most of the continent. The country has achieved fiber-to-the-home penetration surpassing 20% in urban areas, with annual subscription growth rates exceeding 30% in recent years.

Kenya’s national approach offers a different model worth noting. The country’s National Optic Fibre Backbone Infrastructure project has connected over 50 counties. This is a government-led buildout that has given private operators something to anchor onto in otherwise unviable markets.

The Investment Gap

Despite this progress, the scale of what remains undone is sobering. A joint OECD and African Union Commission report concluded that Africa needs $36 billion per year in fiber-optic investment through 2040. That figure represents not a stretch goal but a baseline requirement to close existing coverage deficits and meet projected demand.

Fewer than one-third of Africans currently have access to broadband connectivity. Of the 25 least-connected countries in the world, 21 are located in Africa. Three hundred million Africans live more than 50 kilometres from a fiber or cable broadband connection.

Affordability compounds the coverage problem. Monthly broadband costs in 18 African countries averaged $56 in 2024, compared with $46 in Latin America and the Caribbean and $17 in developing Asian economies. Deploying fiber without addressing what end users can afford to pay simply creates expensive, underutilized infrastructure.

Nigeria: Ambition Versus Execution

No country illustrates the tension between ambition and reality more sharply than Nigeria. The country sits on a paradox: Nigeria has access to various submarine cable systems with approximately 10 terabytes of bandwidth at landing points, but much of this capacity lies fallow due to a lack of last-mile infrastructure to move it inland from the shores.

The government’s response has been ambitious in design if slow in delivery. Nigeria’s 90,000-kilometre fiber project, backed by at least $700 million from development partners including the World Bank and the African Development Bank, is designed to expand the country’s fiber optic backbone from 35,000km to 125,000km. The initiative, known as Project Bridge, has been structured as a Special Purpose Vehicle with private sector co-investment. It targets 20,000 direct and 150,000 indirect jobs and projects a GDP contribution of between $472 billion and $502 billion over four years.

But as of early 2025, the project had not broken ground. High Right-of-Way costs, regulatory bottlenecks, and multiple taxation have slowed operators long before any cable is laid. Nigeria ended 2024 at 44.43% broadband penetration, well short of the 70% target set under its National Broadband Plan.

Vandalism: An Underreported Crisis

One obstacle that rarely features prominently in investment brochures is physical damage to fiber infrastructure. In Nigeria, it has become a chronic operational problem. More than 50,000 fiber cut incidents were recorded in 2023, of which around 30,000 were linked to road projects undertaken by federal and state authorities. Telecom executives have estimated that these cuts cost operators approximately N5 billion in 2024 in Lagos alone.

In response, President Bola Tinubu signed an executive order in August 2024 declaring telecommunications infrastructure as Critical National Information Infrastructure, making deliberate damage a criminal offence under the Cybercrimes Act. The Nigerian Communications Commission has since partnered with the civil defence corps to enforce compliance, though the problem persists. MTN reported 9,218 fiber cuts in 2025, roughly 25 per day, up from 9,000 in 2024 and 6,000 in 2023. The trajectory is moving in the wrong direction.

What Effective Deployment Actually Requires

The countries making the most progress share certain characteristics beyond capital. They combine backbone investment with deliberate last-mile policy, infrastructure-sharing frameworks, and coordination between telecoms regulators and civil works agencies — the latter being precisely the breakdown causing thousands of cable cuts in Nigeria annually.

Hybrid models are also emerging across the continent, where fiber backhaul connects to wireless technologies like 4G or 5G to achieve last-mile delivery, helping reduce costs while still leveraging fiber’s high capacity. This is not a compromise in geographically dispersed or low-density markets, it is the practical architecture.

Data centers are increasingly part of this equation too. Fifty-six new data centers are expected to launch across Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya by the end of 2025, adding approximately 400 megawatts of power capacity. Fiber connectivity is what makes these centers viable as commercial infrastructure rather than isolated compute nodes.

The Distance Between Cable and Connectivity

Africa’s fiber expansion story is genuinely advancing. The network is longer, the investment pipeline is deeper, and the policy attention is more sustained than at any previous point. But the continent’s digital future will not be determined by how many kilometres of cable are laid. It will be determined by how much of that capacity actually reaches homes, schools, clinics, and businesses in the places that need it most.

That requires more than investment announcements. It requires coordinated execution, protection of existing infrastructure, pricing frameworks that reflect real incomes, and regulatory environments that reward operators for expanding into difficult markets rather than penalizing them with fees and delays. The cable is necessary. It is not sufficient.