(Posted 07th September 2026)
Kenya is the primary digital gateway for East Africa, relying heavily on submarine fiber-optic cables landing in Mombasa to power more than 95% of its international internet traffic. As the country experiences a massive boom in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and local data centers, the capacity and diversity of these cables have become a matter of national economic security.
The Submarine Cables Landing in Kenya:
Kenya currently features seven operational submarine cable systems, with two major expansions arriving shortly to push the total to nine:
TEAMS (The East African Marine System): Launched in 2009, this is a strategic joint venture between the Government of Kenya and local telecom operators, connecting Mombasa directly to Fujairah, UAE.
SEACOM: The first private venture to break the monopoly in 2009, linking South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, and Djibouti onward to Europe and India via SEACOM Kenya.
EASSy (Eastern Africa Submarine System): A massive 10,500 km regional cable running down the East African coastline with heavy consortium backing.
LION2 (Lower Indian Ocean Network 2): An extension managed by Telkom Kenya that secures connectivity to the Indian Ocean islands (Mayotte, Réunion, Mauritius) and routes traffic back to Mombasa.
DARE 1 (Djibouti Africa Regional Express 1): A high-capacity regional cable interconnecting Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti.
PEACE Cable (Pakistan & East Africa Connecting Europe): A 15,000 km ultra-high-speed network that went live recently, bringing massive data capacities (up to 192 Tbps) directly from Mombasa to Marseille and Asia.
2Africa: One of the world’s largest subsea projects, backed by global giants and deployed by WIOCC Kenya, wrapping around the entire African continent to exponentially elevate bandwidth.
Upcoming (by 2027): Daraja (Oman-Kenya) backed by Meta and Safaricom, and Africa-1, pushing Kenya’s overall international bandwidth past 28 Terabits per second.
also dependent on the Mombasa gateway are the hinterland countries, primarily Uganda but also countries further inland like Rwanda.
Armed conflicts and civil unrest have however impacted on the timely linkage for Eastern Congo and South Sudan to these fibre optic networks, having them rely on slower and more costly uplinks to satellites.
