Telecommunications in Kenya include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet.
In the Seychelles, local and international telecommunications lines are operated by Cable & Wireless. In 1997 there were around 11,000 telephone lines and in excess of 20,000 telephones, meaning that over half of the population have a home telephone.
Telecommunications in Tanzania include radio, television, fixed and mobile telephones, and the Internet available in mainland Tanzania and the semiautonomous Zanzibar archipelago.
Emirates Telecommunications Group Company PJSC, doing business as etisalat by e& is an Emirati-based multinational telecommunications services provider, currently operating in 16 countries across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. It is the 18th largest mobile network operator in the world by number of subscribers. In December 2020, Etisalat claimed to provide the world's fastest 5G download speed at 9.1 Gigabits per second, a network that has started rolling out in Dubai since 2017. Etisalat is one of the strongest brands in the Middle East and Africa and one of the strongest telecoms brand in the world.
SAT-3/WASC or South Atlantic 3/West Africa Submarine Cable is a submarine communications cable linking Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the route.
The Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) is an undersea fibre optic cable system connecting countries in Eastern Africa to the rest of the world.
Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) is a 28,000-kilometre-long fibre optic mostly-submarine communications cable that connects the United Kingdom, Japan, India, and many places in between. The cable is operated by Global Cloud Xchange, a subsidiary of RCOM. The system runs from the eastern coast of North America to Japan. Its Europe–Asia segment was the fourth longest cable in the world in 2008.
South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 is an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France. It is intended to be a complement to, rather than a replacement for, the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable.
The Internet in Africa is limited by a lower penetration rate when compared to the rest of the world. Measurable parameters such as the number of ISP subscriptions, overall number of hosts, IXP-traffic, and overall available bandwidth are indicators that Africa is far behind the "digital divide". Moreover, Africa itself exhibits an inner digital divide, with most Internet activity and infrastructure concentrated in South Africa, Morocco, Egypt as well as smaller economies like Mauritius and Seychelles. In general, only 24.4% of the African population have access to the Internet, as of 2018. Only 0.4% of the African population has a fixed-broadband subscription. The majority of internet users use it through mobile broadband.
The Internet in South Africa, one of the most technologically resourced countries on the African continent, is expanding. The internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) .za is managed and regulated by the .za Domain Name Authority (.ZADNA) and was granted to South Africa by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 1990. Over 60% of Internet traffic generated on the African continent originates from South Africa. As of 2020, 41.5 million people were Internet users.
SEACOM launched Africa's first broadband submarine cable system along the continent's Eastern and Southern coasts in 2009. SEACOM is privately owned and operated.
Greenland Connect is a submarine communications cable system that connects Canada, Greenland, and Iceland. The cable contains two fibre pairs specified for 128*10 Gbit/s wavelength each. Initial lit capacity is 1*10 Gbit/s for each fibre pair. Two additional 10 Gbit/s Wavelength were installed in the summer of 2010. The cable has cable landing points at:
Europe India Gateway (EIG) is a submarine communications cable system that connects the U.K., Portugal, Gibraltar, Monaco, France, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and India.
The West Africa Cable System (WACS) is a submarine communications cable linking South Africa with the United Kingdom along the west coast of Africa that was constructed by Alcatel-Lucent. The cable consists of four fibre pairs and is 14,530 km in length, linking from Yzerfontein in the Western Cape of South Africa to London in the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points, 12 along the western coast of Africa and 2 in Europe completed on land by a cable termination station in London. The total cost for the cable system is $650 million. WACS was originally known as the Africa West Coast Cable (AWCC) and was planned to branch to South America but this was dropped and the system eventually became the West African Cable System.
Broadband is a term normally considered to be synonymous with a high-speed connection to the internet. Suitability for certain applications, or technically a certain quality of service, is often assumed. For instance, low round trip delay would normally be assumed to be well under 150ms and suitable for Voice over IP, online gaming, financial trading especially arbitrage, virtual private networks and other latency-sensitive applications. This would rule out satellite Internet as inherently high-latency. In some applications, utility-grade reliability or security are often also assumed or defined as requirements. There is no single definition of broadband and official plans may refer to any or none of these criteria.
Honotua is a submarine communications cable system that connects several islands of French Polynesia via Tahiti to Hawaii. The cable was laid by the cableship Île de Ré (câblier) between December 2009 and June 2010.
SAex is a proposed submarine communications cable linking South Africa to the United States with branches to Namibia, Saint Helena, and Brazil.
The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) is a submarine communications cable providing a direct trunk connection between Barka and Penang (Malaysia) with four branches to Fujairah (UAE), Mumbai (India), Colombo and Chennai (India). The project was carried out by a consortium that includes Vodafone, Omantel, Etisalat, AT&T, China Telecom, Telstra, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Dialog and Telekom Malaysia. Construction was started in May 2013 and was completed by the end of 2014. From Penang the system is connected via a terrestrial connection to Singapore. The length of the submarine Cable system is 5,934 kilometres (3,687 mi) from Barka to Penang, with a 216 km (134 mi) branch to Fujairah, 426 km (265 mi) branch to Mumbai, 142 km (88 mi) branch to Colombo and a 1,322 km (821 mi) branch to Chennai, totalling a total length of 8,040 km (5,000 mi).
West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC) operates as a wholesaler, providing capacity to international telecoms, cloud operators, content providers and internet service providers within and out of Africa. WIOCC offers carriers connectivity to over 550 locations across 30 African countries – utilising more than 75,000 km (47,000 mi) of terrestrial fibre and 200,000 km (120,000 mi) of submarine fibre-optic cable. WIOCC's international network reach currently extends to 100 cities in 29 countries in Europe and more than 700 cities in 70 countries globally.
