South Africa’s economy depends on what lies beneath the ocean

Every online payment, cloud backup, video call and AI query feels instantaneous. None of it is weightless. Each depends on a physical system of fibre networks, internet exchanges, data centres and landing stations — and almost all of it, at some point on its journey, on a cable lying on the seabed. The International Telecommunication Union estimates that submarine cables carry around 99% of the world’s internet traffic, including the financial transactions, cloud computing and government communications a modern economy runs on. TeleGeography’s 2026 submarine cable map counts 694 cable systems and 1,893 landing stations worldwide. South Africa is connected to that system through 11 subsea cables across nine international cable systems — WACS, SAT-3/WASC, SAFE, SEACOM, EASSy, METISS, ACE, Equiano and 2Africa.

Dependence on this system is not, in itself, a vulnerability. Every open economy depends on subsea cables; that is simply what participating in the global digital economy means. The vulnerability lies in unmanaged dependence. A country’s real exposure is decided not by how much traffic crosses the ocean, but by what happens in the hours and weeks after a cable fails — because cables do fail, routinely.

South Africa learned this in March 2024, when the Internet Society reported that a West African submarine cable outage disrupted connectivity in 13 African countries, including our own. WACS, SAT-3, ACE and MainOne were all affected, and repair timelines stretched across weeks, with some restoration estimates running into May. The episode carried two lessons. The first is that faults are a normal condition of the system, not an exception — most are caused by something as mundane as fishing gear or a ship’s anchor. The second lesson is the one that matters for economic planning: resilience is not measured by how many cables land on your shores. It is measured by how quickly traffic reroutes when one breaks, and how quickly the break is repaired. Countries with route diversity and operational readiness experienced slower internet. Countries without them faced a business continuity crisis.

More capacity is coming, and it is welcome. The 2Africa system, activated at the end of 2025, connects 33 countries across three continents with up to 180 Tbps on its main trunks, and its Pearls extension is scheduled for 2026. Google’s Umoja system is expected to link Africa directly to Australia across the Indian Ocean in 2026 or 2027. SEACOM has announced SEACOM 2.0, a planned 48-fibre-pair system built for AI, cloud and real-time data. Each new system adds redundancy, competition and bandwidth. But capacity is not resilience, and this is where public conversation about connectivity usually stops one layer too early.

A subsea cable’s value is realised — or wasted — onshore. At a cable landing station, international capacity is turned into national capacity, and everything depends on what stands behind that station: backhaul into the national network, diversity of inland routes, round-the-clock monitoring, wet plant spares, testing capability, clean handover to service providers, and the ability to respond when something breaks. Strip those away and a landing station is just a building on a beach. A cable is worth exactly what the network behind it can do with it, and no more.

This is the layer where Telkom carries a responsibility that most South Africans never see. Openserve, the Group’s infrastructure business, operates strategic cable landing infrastructure at Melkbosstrand and Yzerfontein on the Atlantic seaboard and at Mtunzini on the Indian Ocean coast. That two-ocean geography matters: it is the first and most fundamental form of redundancy, allowing traffic to shift between east- and west-coast routes when a system on one side fails. Beyond our own shores, Openserve is one of the major service providers to submarine cables reaching Africa south of the equator, and Telkom maintains the spares, repair kits and service gear that keep those systems running for the continent’s cable operators. It is unglamorous work with a demanding truth at its centre: resilience is not created during an outage. It is created in the years before one — in the spares held ready, the routes pre-planned, and the disciplines maintained when nothing is wrong.

It also explains why Telkom occupies a different position from a mobile operator, a fibre provider or an enterprise technology company. The chain that carries international capacity into a South African business or home — landing infrastructure, a national fibre network now beyond 180,000 kilometres, wholesale access, more than 7,000 integrated 4.5G mobile sites, and the enterprise and IT capability of BCX — sits within one group. That matters for a practical reason, not a sentimental one: infrastructure usually fails at the handover points, where one party’s accountability ends and another’s begins. When the layers of the chain share a parent, accountability for continuity does not fragment at precisely the moments it is needed most.

The stakes are rising, not falling. Reuters reported in 2025 that Africa still accounts for less than 1% of global data centre capacity, while mobile data usage on the continent grows by roughly 40% a year. More of that data will be processed locally and regionally over time — but local processing deepens rather than removes the dependence on international connectivity. AI adoption runs on offshore cloud computing power. Cloud regions synchronise with each other across oceans. A “local” digital service is usually local only at its last mile; everything upstream of it crosses the seabed.

The conclusion for business leaders and policymakers is straightforward: subsea resilience should be treated as economic infrastructure, with the same seriousness we give ports and power — protection of cable corridors, investment in repair and restoration capability, and deliberate diversity in landing geography and inland routes. South Africa starts with real advantages here: two oceans, established landing infrastructure on both, and a national network deep enough to absorb and reroute international capacity at scale.

South Africa’s digital future rests on a longer chain than most people see. Towers, fibre routes, data centres and digital platforms are only the visible links of a system that begins far beyond the coastline. Through its landing infrastructure, and through the national network that gives that infrastructure its meaning, Telkom holds the first link in that chain — and keeps it ready for the moment it is tested.

By: Amu Maja, Executive: Carrier and Global Business at Openserve