Good news for Internet connectivity in South Africa

Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp parent company Meta Platforms has announced Project Waterworth, which will see it run a new subsea cable over 50,000km, connecting five continents.

Meta announced the project in a blog post. It said the project would be the world’s longest subsea cable and be built using the highest-capacity technology available.

“Project Waterworth will bring industry-leading connectivity to the U.S., India, Brazil, South Africa, and other key regions,” said Meta.

“This project will enable greater economic cooperation, facilitate digital inclusion, and open opportunities for technological development in these regions.”

It added that in regions where there has been significant growth and investment in digital infrastructure, such as India and South Africa, the new cable will help accelerate this progress.

Meta said the new high-speed connectivity provided through Project Waterworth will drive artificial intelligence (AI) innovation globally.

“Project Waterworth will be a multi-billion dollar, multi-year investment to strengthen the scale and reliability of the world’s digital highways by opening three new oceanic corridors with abundant, high-speed connectivity,” it added.

Meta said the project would advance engineering design to ensure cable resilience, enabling it to build the longest 24-fibre pair cable project in the world.

Meta also plans to deploy first-of-its-kind routing, which will maximise cabling laid in deep water, and it will also use enhanced burial techniques in high-risk fault areas to avoid damage from ship anchors and other hazards.

Project Waterworth will add another route to the 10 undersea cables connecting South Africa to the rest of the world. At 50,000km, it will be 5,000km longer than the 2Africa cable, in which Meta also invested.

Although wireless communication has improved significantly over the years, cabled connectivity provides greater capacity, higher speeds, and lower latency.

Underground and above-ground cables are typically used for communication between countries on the same continent, while intercontinental communications require extensive cables laid along the ocean floor.

This has been effective. However, depending on their depth, some subsea cables are vulnerable to seismic activity and damage from heavy objects like ship anchors.

Undersea cable outages hammered South Africa in 2024

Faults on undersea cables connected to South Africa were a common theme in 2024, with numerous South African network outages resulting from cable breaks.

The most severe breaks occurred on 14 March, causing a nationwide Vodacom data network and Microsoft Azure outage.

The cause: three near-simultaneous cable breaks off the coast of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire. These included the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), and SAT3 cables.

A fourth subsea cable also suffered a fault — MainOne — but it doesn’t extend to South Africa.

MainOne said a submarine landslide caused the faults. This caused significant service disruptions for Microsoft Azure, which impacted Microsoft Office 365 customers in South Africa.

Microsoft confirmed that the cable outages had reduced the total capacity supporting its regions in South Africa.

Vodacom subscribers nationwide were unable to access the Internet for several hours. It and Microsoft were the most severely affected by the cable breaks.

However, Downdetector showed significant spikes in reports of issues on various websites, apps, and networks, including FNB, LinkedIn, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, X, and Xbox.

Many broadband users, including Mweb, Openserve, Seacom, Telkom, Vodacom, Vumatel, and Vox subscribers, also reported problems.

About a month later, the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) and Seacom suffered faults, causing all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa to be shut down.

The outage came just two months after Seacom, along with two other telecommunications cables, suffered a break in the Red Sea after Houthi rebels attacked a ship, causing it to drop its anchor.