Comoros

Submarine cable connectivity

Comoros reaches the global submarine network through EASSy — the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System — which lands at Moroni on Grande Comore, the largest island in the archipelago. EASSy spans roughly 10,000 kilometres along the eastern African coastline, linking a string of nations from South Africa northward and providing onward connectivity to Europe, the Middle East and Asia through interconnections with other major systems.

For Comoros, that single landing point defines the outer limits of the country's submarine cable infrastructure. All international traffic carried over fibre must pass through Moroni, meaning the archipelago has no alternative cable route if EASSy experiences an outage, a cut or a capacity constraint at that segment. The practical consequence is straightforward: Comoros sits at the more exposed end of the resilience spectrum among Sub-Saharan African nations with submarine cable access.

Geography and its constraints

The geography of Comoros compounds the challenge. The country is a small island group sitting in the northern Mozambique Channel, positioned between the African mainland and Madagascar. That location places it within reach of the East African cable corridor — which is how EASSy came to serve it — but the archipelago lacks the population scale or traffic volumes that typically attract competing cable operators to build redundant landings.

The outer islands of the Comoros group — Anjouan, Mohéli and Mayotte (the latter administered by France) — are not documented here as hosting their own cable landings, which means inter-island connectivity and any onward international traffic from those islands likely depend on domestic microwave links, satellite, or routing back through Grande Comore.

Capacity and resilience

EASSy is a multi-terabit capable system built on a consortium model involving numerous African and international carriers, which gives the cable itself a degree of financial and operational backing. The capacity available to any individual landing country, however, depends on the capacity rights purchased rather than the cable's theoretical maximum — and for a small island nation, those rights may be modest.

With no second cable in the documented inventory, Comoros has no automatic failover path at the submarine level. Any significant disruption to the EASSy segment serving Moroni would push international traffic onto satellite links, which carry far higher latency and lower aggregate throughput. Diversifying the landing infrastructure — either through a second EASSy branching unit or an entirely separate cable system — would materially change the resilience picture for the country.