Guinea-Bissau connects to its first international fiber optic submarine cable
March 29th 2023
Guinea-Bissau began work to connect to the ACE cable in 2017. It is the last country in West Africa to connect to this infrastructure launched in 2012 and which connects around twenty African and European countries.
Guinea-Bissau finalized, Tuesday, March 28, its connection to its first international fiber optic submarine cable: the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE). The country is thus laying “ the foundations of the largest national telecommunications infrastructure project ” in its history, according to Deputy Prime Minister Soares Sambu (photo, center).
The connection system connects the city of Suru, in the northeast of Guinea-Bissau, to the power station of Antula, in the suburbs of Bissau, over a distance of 30 km. An internal distribution network will be built to route data to other regions of the country.
The Guinea-Bissau connection project to the ACE international submarine cable started in 2017. It is the result of an agreement signed between the government and the mobile telephone operators Orange and MTN. The State was to invest $31.5 million obtained from the World Bank, while each of the two operators was to provide approximately $8 million over five years.
Guinea Bissau’s connection to the ACE cable comes in a context of accelerated digital transformation marked by the growing demand from governments, businesses and populations for high-speed connectivity. The commissioning of this infrastructure should allow the country to begin “ a real process of transformation based on telecommunications ”, declared Mr. Sambu.
Anne-Lucie Lefebvre (photo, right), World Bank representative in Guinea-Bissau, believes that the new infrastructure would guarantee the Guinean population better Internet services at reduced costs.
This should also facilitate the adoption of telecom services in the country. According to statistics from the National Authority for the Regulation of Information and Communication Technologies (ANR), the country had 1.09 million Internet users in 2021 for a penetration of 66%. The number of mobile service subscribers was 1.64 million for a penetration rate of 105%.
Back