Orange Reinforces Backbone Network Connectivity in West Africa

Orange announced at AfricaCom the construction of a new international backbone network in West Africa. This infrastructure will be built around a terrestrial fibre optic network coupled with submarine cables and will benefit from centralized supervision. This multi-regional West African network will connect to the rest of the world through various submarine cables and will link up all the main capital cities in the region: Dakar, Bamako, Abidjan, Accra, Lagos…

The network will offer high levels of resilience and seamless availability thanks to diversified paths. As a result, a complete range of international connectivity services with accelerated delivery will be proposed. This includes IPL (International Private Line) services with bandwidth of 2 Mbps to 100 Gigabits and EPL (Ethernet Private Line) offers enabling natively secure point to point connections (L2 VPN) and available bandwidth from 2 Mbps to 10 Gigabits.

Orange is also offering international stakeholders access to its extensive solutions portfolio: hosting, OP transit, mobile data services (IPX), voice services, security, content delivery networks…

This new network is designed to provide large-scale international capacity and, in consequence, will help support the development of a digital ecosystem and meet business needs in West Africa. In addition to recent investments in the MainOne submarine cable connecting Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire to Europe, the West African backbone network represents a new stage in the development of Orange’s international connectivity in Africa.

The commercial launch of the West African backbone is planned for the second quarter of 2020 and will consolidate Orange’s position as a regional leader.

Updates: 

In November 2020, Orange announced the commissioning and commercial launch of Djoliba, the first pan-African backbone network, covering 8 countries: Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. This Djoliba network infrastructure is based on a terrestrial fibre optic network, coupled with undersea cables, offering secure connectivity abroad from West Africa.