A shopper walks past an MTN shop
A shopper walks past an MTN shop at a mall in Johannesburg, South Africa, March 2, 2017. Reuters / Siphiwe Sibeko

The world's longest undersea cable, 2Africa, has made landfall at Yzerfontein and linked to its cable landing station at Duynefontein near Cape Town as announced by MTN GlobalConnect Tuesday.

"Data traffic across African markets is expected to grow between four and five-fold over the next 5 years, so we need infrastructure and capacity to meet that level of growth and demand," MTN Group Chief Executive Ralph Mupita said in a statement, according to Reuters.

2Africa is a consortium-owned project that will connect the African continent to Europe and Asia. The cable is 45,000km long and stretches around the entire continent, once completed.

Members of the consortium include MTN GlobalConnect, China Mobile International, Meta Platforms, Orange, Center3, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, and WIOCC, Reuters reported.

Additionally, 2Africa will not only be the world's longest cable, but it will also have the highest design capacity of any subsea cable currently serving the continent, at 180Tbps. This is 36Tbps faster than Google's Equiano cable, which is over seven times larger than other cables connecting South Africa to other continents.

The subsea cable will serve 33 markets and have at least 47 landing stations. MTN GlobalConnect will be handling six of these carrier stations — two in South Africa, one in Ghana, one in Nigeria, one in Côte d'Ivoire, and one in Sudan.

According to the 2022 Speedtest Global Index, South Africa has the fastest mobile internet speed on the continent, but it is still below the global average. The average mobile internet download speed in South Africa is 68.9 megabits per second (Mbps), compared to the global average of 77.7 Mbps

South Africa is in 46th position globally for download speeds, followed by Togo, Mauritius, Morocco, and Botswana in Africa.

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Internet outages are a big problem in Africa, with the survey revealing that during the second quarter of 2022, users reported 46,810 incidents for Vodacom and 34,882 for MTN.

"We can clearly see the impact that 5G has on overall performance as South African operators came first thanks to having 5G networks in place. MTN South Africa was well ahead of the rest of the operators, despite facing challenges with load shedding, with a median download speed of 65.95 Mbps, followed by Vodacom South Africa with a median download speed of 48.70 Mbps," said Sylwia Kechiche, principal industry analyst, enterprise at Ookla, in the report.