Somalia

Cables and landing points

Somalia's documented connection to the global submarine cable network runs through Mogadishu, the capital and sole confirmed landing point on the register. One active system serves the country: EASSy (Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System), a 10,000-kilometre cable that links East African coastal nations to one another and to onward connections at either end of its route. A second system, Africa-1, is recorded as planned, though a ready-for-service date and route length have not been confirmed.

Capacity and resilience

A single active cable landing is a significant structural vulnerability. When a country's entire submarine fibre capacity routes through one system and one landing point, any fault on that cable — whether a ship's anchor, a seabed event, or a maintenance outage — cuts international bandwidth to whatever satellite capacity or terrestrial alternatives can carry. For Somalia, that exposure is real and unambiguous: EASSy is not a redundant system, it is the system.

The planned Africa-1 cable would, once operational, introduce a degree of path diversity. A second cable arriving at Mogadishu — or at another Somali landing point — would mean that a fault on EASSy does not leave the country wholly dependent on satellite fallback. Until Africa-1 reaches service, however, that resilience does not exist in practice.

It is worth noting that even with two cables, diversity is only meaningful if the systems take physically separate routes and land at separate stations. Two cables sharing a single beach manhole, or running parallel across the same seabed corridor, offer limited protection against a localised event.

Geography and context

Somalia's coastline is one of the longest on the African continent, fronting both the Indian Ocean to the east and, in the north, the Gulf of Aden — one of the world's busiest submarine cable corridors. That geography is a potential asset: the country sits on natural routing paths for cables connecting the Middle East, South Asia, and East Africa. The challenge has been translating coastal position into cable infrastructure, a process that depends on investment, stable landing-station operations, and the commercial confidence of cable consortiums.

Mogadishu's role as the single confirmed landing point concentrates both the opportunity and the risk at one location. Expanding the number of landing points along Somalia's coast would distribute that risk and open access to connectivity for population centres beyond the capital.