Cabo Verde

Cable connections

Cabo Verde is served by three active submarine cable systems: ATLANTIS-2, SAT-1 and the West Africa Cable System (WACS). All documented landings are at Praia, the capital, on the island of Santiago. For a small island nation anchored more than 500 kilometres off the West African coast, that count represents meaningful connectivity — most comparable archipelago states manage far less.

WACS is the heaviest lifter of the three in terms of geographic reach, spanning some 14,500 kilometres and threading down the Atlantic coast of Africa. ATLANTIS-2 covers roughly 12,000 kilometres, connecting across the Atlantic with onward reach toward South America and Europe. SAT-1 adds a third strand to the mix, though its length and vintage are not fully documented in the current register.

What the cable mix means for resilience

Three cables is not the same as three independent paths. Because all documented landings converge on a single point — Praia — the architecture creates a geographic concentration risk that the cable count alone does not resolve. A cut or fault near the landing station, or damage to the terrestrial infrastructure linking the cable head to national networks, could affect traffic carried across more than one system simultaneously.

That said, the diversity of the cables themselves offers some structural resilience. ATLANTIS-2 and WACS operate on distinct routes with different ownership consortia and maintenance agreements, meaning a fault on one cable's segment does not automatically impair the other. Whether Cabo Verde has negotiated capacity on all three systems — rather than relying primarily on one — determines how effectively that theoretical redundancy translates to operational resilience.

Geography and strategic position

Cabo Verde's mid-Atlantic position is both a constraint and an advantage. The archipelago lies well off the African continental shelf, which pushes cable costs up but also places it naturally along transoceanic routes that would pass nearby regardless. This makes Cabo Verde a plausible intermediate landing point for cables routing between Europe, West Africa and South America — a role ATLANTIS-2 in particular reflects.

For domestic connectivity across the islands, the submarine cables serving Praia must be complemented by inter-island links, whether domestic submarine cables, satellite capacity or microwave. The international cables documented here address the country's external bandwidth; internal distribution is a separate layer of the network picture.

Register status

Ready-for-service dates for all three cables serving Cabo Verde are not confirmed in the current dataset. Length data for SAT-1 is similarly incomplete. The register will be updated as verified records are available.