With the November 2025 completion of the core 2Africa subsea cable, Libreville and Pointe-Noire are joining the global broadband backbone like no Central African city has done before. The economic implications for the CEMAC are already taking shape — provided the region can deal with its bottlenecks.

On 17 November 2025, Meta announced that the core infrastructure of the 2Africa cable was complete. Six years after the project was unveiled, the world’s longest open-access subsea cable now stretches 45,000 kilometres, links 33 countries, and is set to reach 46 landing points once the Pearls extension goes live in 2026. For the CEMAC, this milestone is more than another press release: it is the most significant upgrade of the region’s connectivity since the West Africa Cable System (WACS) reached Limbe in 2012.

A new digital geography for Central Africa

The 2Africa West African trunk lands directly in Libreville (Gabon) and Pointe-Noire (Republic of Congo), with an additional landing in Muanda, on the Atlantic coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. According to Meta’s engineering team, the cable supports 21 terabits per second per fibre pair across eight pairs, giving a total trunk capacity of up to 180 Tbps. To put that in perspective, this is enough international bandwidth to dwarf the combined consumption of every household, business and data centre in the CEMAC many times over.

Cameroon, paradoxically the region’s digital heavyweight, is not a direct landing point for 2Africa. The country continues to rely on its existing systems — WACS, SAIL and the South Atlantic Inter Link — and will need terrestrial fibre to access the new capacity coming ashore in Libreville or Lagos. The same logic applies, even more starkly, to landlocked Chad, Central African Republic, and the eastern reaches of the sub-region. Their access to the new bandwidth depends entirely on the quality and pricing of cross-border backhaul, an area where the Central African Backbone (CAB) initiative has so far underdelivered.

The price effect: a bandwidth shock waiting to happen

Wholesale bandwidth prices in the CEMAC have historically ranked among the highest in Africa. According to various reports from the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union, a megabit of international IP transit can cost ten to fifteen times more in N’Djamena or Bangui than in Nairobi or Lagos. The cause is well known: a thin, oligopolistic market dominated by incumbent telecom operators with little incentive to lower prices.

By multiplying available capacity, 2Africa changes the equation. Meta itself estimates that the cable could add up to 36.9 billion US dollars to Africa’s GDP within the first two to three years of operation. In landing countries, the experience of past cables (Equiano in West Africa, MainOne in Nigeria, EASSy in East Africa) shows that wholesale prices typically fall by 30 to 60 percent within eighteen months. For CEMAC consumers and businesses, this would translate into materially cheaper mobile data, more affordable cloud services and, critically, a more viable economic case for hosting content and data closer to home.

Data centres and the local hosting paradox

The connectivity upgrade matters because it makes a previously impossible business model finally workable: hosting commercial data centres inside the CEMAC. Today, the vast majority of websites, apps and SaaS platforms consumed in Libreville or Yaoundé are physically hosted in Paris, Marseille or Johannesburg. Every click triggers an expensive round trip on submarine fibre. With 2Africa’s open-access architecture, regional carriers and hyperscalers can dimension capacity differently — and Africa Data Centres, Raxio, Paix and other emerging players will sharpen their pencils.

Gabon’s ambition to position Libreville as a regional digital hub becomes more credible in this context. The country has been talking up data sovereignty since the launch of its national digital strategy, and the new cable strengthens its hand against more developed but more distant competitors in Lagos or Casablanca.

Three questions for CEMAC regulators

The cable, however, is only the supply side of the equation. Three structural issues will determine whether the dividend reaches end users.

First, the last-mile problem. International capacity is useless without fibre to the home, mobile coverage and electricity. The CEMAC’s average fixed broadband penetration remains below 1 percent, and rural mobile coverage continues to lag.

Second, regulatory openness. Will national regulators ensure that wholesale prices actually fall? In several markets, incumbent operators have historically captured most of the value from previous cable upgrades without transmitting savings to consumers. The Cameroonian and Gabonese regulators face a credibility test.

Third, digital sovereignty. 2Africa is led by Meta in a consortium that includes Orange, Vodafone, MTN and several Chinese and Gulf telcos. The fact that one of the world’s most powerful private companies is now central to Africa’s connectivity raises legitimate questions about the long-term governance of critical digital infrastructure — questions the CEMAC has barely begun to address.

The bottom line: 2Africa is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for the region. Whether it becomes the catalyst for a Central African digital economy or another underused piece of infrastructure depends less on what Meta does and more on what Libreville, Brazzaville, Yaoundé and Malabo decide to do next.