Airtel Nigeria has announced plans to establish the second international internet breakout of Nigeria designed to end the total reliance of the nation on Lagos as its gateway to the global web. This centralized architecture has made the national network vulnerable to localized infrastructure failures, such as fiber cuts or power outages in the Lagos corridor.
Airtel, in partnership with the 2Africa submarine cable consortium, planned to route data through a new landing station in Kwa Ibo, Akwa Ibom State.
The southern breakout point reduces latency and ensures that when Lagos sneezes, the rest of the country no longer catches a cold.
The new project will utilize the 45,000km 2Africa cable, which is the world’s longest subsea system, to provide a secondary entry point for a faster and more resilient path for internet traffic in both the Northern and Southern regions.
“This will create a faster and alternative path for large parts of the North and South and improve resilience for the entire ecosystem. Airtel is proud to take the lead in making this happen” – Dinesh Balsingh, CEO of Airtel Nigeria
Meanwhile, Airtel is currently increasing its fiber-optic footprint by 25% across major cities in Nigeria and has already enabled 4G services on 99.99% of its 16,711 nationwide sites. The company has more than doubled its active 5G sites in the last quarter, to cover top 20 cities of the country and to support high-speed home broadband and enterprise services.
Airtel also plans to integrate this subsea capacity with its Direct-to-Cell satellite partnership with Starlink to reach remote communities to provide a fail-safe network for over 179 million mobile subscribers.
