Why the Internet Runs on Undersea Cables

Zach Martin

Welcome to Ocean Capital Desk, an IRHUB Media and KMKT original. I'm Zach Martin. Let's start with a garden hose. Not a metaphor, an actual garden hose. In deep water, a submarine telecommunications cable is roughly that thick, twenty to twenty five millimeters across. Now picture that hose lying on the floor of the Atlantic, in places thousands of meters down. And somewhere between ninety seven and ninety nine percent of intercontinental data traffic rides on cables like it. Your video call, your bank transfer, the mobile payment at a market stall. Almost none of it goes through the sky.

Emily Martin

And I'm Emily Martin. That percentage is the part that surprises people. We say the cloud, we say satellites, and the language makes the whole thing sound weightless. But the Carnegie Endowment paper on Africa's undersea infrastructure, written by Jane Munga, says these cables transmit over ninety nine percent of the world's data traffic across oceans and continents. So the cloud has an address, and the address is a seabed. Today we're treating data routes the way earlier centuries treated shipping lanes, as trade routes, and we're testing that idea on our recurring case, Sierra Leone, a country whose connection to the wider internet comes ashore at a single beach in Freetown.

Zach Martin

Before we get to the beach, I want us to earn the physics, because the physics is where the risk comes from. You can't understand why one cable is a fragile bet until you know what's inside that hose and what it needs to keep working. Emily, walk me through it.

Emily Martin

Inside are bundles of optical fibers, each about as thin as a hair, carrying pulses of laser light. Glass carries light remarkably well, but not forever. The signal fades with distance, which engineers call attenuation. So every fifty to eighty kilometers, an optical amplifier, called a repeater, is spliced into the cable to boost the signal again. And here's the part people miss. Those repeaters need constant electric power, and the power comes from shore. Thousands of volts of direct current are sent from the cable landing stations through a copper conductor running down the center of the cable, surrounding the fibers. So a landing station isn't only a door where data comes ashore. It's also a power station feeding a machine that sits on the seabed, out of sight, for thousands of kilometers.

Zach Martin

Let me put a number on that, with a warning attached. The cable we'll spend the most time on today is the Africa Coast to Europe system, ACE, and it's about seventeen thousand kilometers long. If I take those repeater spacings and divide, I get somewhere around two hundred to three hundred and forty amplifiers. That's my own arithmetic on the general spacing, not a count from the ACE operators, so treat it as a sense of scale. Think of a relay race where the baton is light and every runner needs a drink handed in from the sidelines, except the sidelines are two beaches thousands of kilometers apart.

Emily Martin

I like that, because it tells you where the vulnerability sits. Now, the hose changes as it approaches land. In deep water, the cable is light, because almost nothing disturbs it down there. In shallow water, under about a hundred meters, it's heavily armored with steel wire layers, and the diameter grows to forty or fifty millimeters. It's also buried up to several meters under the sediment. Engineers do that on purpose, because the danger is concentrated near the shore. The Carnegie paper notes that research shows most cable cuts happen in shallow water, zero to a hundred meters, and that the deeper the ocean gets, the smaller the likelihood of a cut.

Zach Martin

Which flips the intuition. You'd think the scary part is the crushing dark depths. The scary part is the busy neighborhood close to the beach. And the numbers back that up. Carnegie cites studies that put global cable faults at roughly one hundred and fifty to two hundred a year, and seventy to eighty percent of those are accidental, mostly from commercial fishing and from vessel anchors. A trawler dragging a net across the bottom, or a ship dropping an anchor in the approaches to a port, and a hose that carries national commerce gets snagged.

Emily Martin

The sources don't agree on the exact count, and that's worth saying out loud. The Internet Society, in its report on a major West African outage, uses an estimate of about a hundred fiber cuts a year. So you've got a hundred in one source, a hundred and fifty to two hundred in another. Both are describing the same reality, which is that cable faults are routine. The industry plans for them. What it can't always plan for is several faults at once, or a single fault in a place where a whole country has only one way out.

Zach Martin

There's a vivid example of how strange these accidents can be. In February 2024, a commercial vessel was struck by missiles near the western coast of Yemen. Its crew released one of its anchors and abandoned ship. The vessel drifted for nearly two weeks and then sank in an area with many cables, and subsequent reports indicated damaged cables in the area. That's the Carnegie account. Nobody aimed at a cable. A ship that nobody was steering became an anchor dropped on top of global data routes.

Emily Martin

So now we have the object: glass, copper, steel, hundreds of powered amplifiers, buried near shore and exposed to anchors and nets. Let's tie it back to Episode 1, The Ocean as a Balance Sheet. There we walked through the UNCLOS architecture, and under Article 58 a coastal state holds sovereign rights over natural resources in its Exclusive Economic Zone, but foreign states keep the freedom of navigation and the right to lay submarine cables and pipelines. When we said that, it sounded like a clause in a treaty. Today the clause has a body. It's a physical thing on the seabed, and it forms the foundation of modern national GDP.

Zach Martin

Because everything runs through it. Carnegie says the majority of Africa's connectivity, from e-government services to video conferencing to email, is routed through these cables. And Sierra Leone is our anchoring geography again. The land area is seventy one thousand, six hundred and twenty square kilometers, and as we said in Episode 1, the Exclusive Economic Zone is a number we haven't pinned down. The land we can measure. But a country's real connection to the economy of everyone else isn't measured in land area. It's a line that starts at one beach.

Emily Martin

And the first question about that line is a legal one. Who's allowed to put a hose like that through someone else's waters, and who gets to decide where it comes ashore? The answer turns out to be two different answers, one for the open ocean and one for the beach. That's where we go next.

Emily Martin

Let's take the open ocean first. Under Article 58 of UNCLOS, all states enjoy the freedom to lay and maintain submarine cables and pipelines within a coastal state's Exclusive Economic Zone. The NOAA General Counsel's overview of the international framework describes it as the freedom to lay submarine cables, along with other freedoms related to the operation of those cables. Then Article 79 deals with the continental shelf, and it says the coastal state cannot impede the laying or maintenance of submarine cables there, subject only to reasonable measures for exploring the shelf and exploiting its resources.

Zach Martin

And there's a detail inside Article 79 that I think is the whole story in one sentence. Paragraph three says the course of a pipeline laid on the continental shelf needs the coastal state's consent. Cables don't get that treatment. As we read it, a transit submarine cable that doesn't make landfall in that country doesn't need prior consent for its routing. So a cable can pass through a country's Exclusive Economic Zone, and the country doesn't get a vote on the path.

Emily Martin

Which is a very different bargain from the one over fish or oil. In the EEZ, the coastal state controls what's under and in the water as a resource. But it can't charge a toll to a cable passing through, the way it might charge a foreign fishing fleet for access. For a country that's thinking of its ocean as a balance sheet, that's a limit. The value of the data crossing its waters doesn't show up as a line item.

Zach Martin

So where does the country get leverage? At the landing. Sovereignty resumes fully inside the twelve nautical mile territorial sea and on land. Articles 2, 21, and 79, paragraph four, are the ones to look at. Inside that line, the coastal state controls permitting, environmental impact assessments, customs, landing fees, and the security of the landing station. I think of it like this. The open ocean is a highway, and nobody asks you for papers. The toll booth is where the road meets the town.

Emily Martin

And the toll booths look very different from one coastline to the next. Carnegie points out that UNCLOS lets each of Africa's thirty eight coastal countries write its own laws and policies about undersea cables in its jurisdiction. That means a company that wants to build a cable around the continent has to deal with oversight bodies in every one of those countries. In Ghana, the National Communications Authority regulates cables through the Electronic Communications Act of 2008. In Nigeria, the Nigerian Communications Commission has its own regulation.

Zach Martin

And the fees vary widely. Carnegie compares two neighbors. In Kenya, the licensing fee for an undersea cable is fifteen million Kenyan shillings, around a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars, plus an upfront operating fee of up to four million shillings, around thirty thousand dollars. In Tanzania, the regulator charges a licensing fee of ten thousand dollars and an operating fee of four hundred thousand dollars for an initial period of fifteen years. So you go from nominal amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars within a single region.

Emily Martin

Carnegie's argument, and this is its interpretation rather than a settled fact, is that hefty permit fees can be counterproductive. The continent wants more cables landing, because more cables means more redundancy. If the permit price discourages the next cable, then a fee that looks like revenue today is also a price on resilience tomorrow. We don't have Sierra Leone's fee schedule in our sources, so we won't invent one. But that's the question to ask about any landing country. Is it charging for access, or paying for safety?

Zach Martin

That's a good coaching question for a regulator, actually. Are you optimizing for this quarter or for the system? Now let's talk about protection, because the treaty has a section on that too. Article 113 requires states to pass domestic laws that punish willful or culpably negligent damage to cables by their flagged ships or their nationals. Article 115 sets up an indemnity. If a vessel owner can prove they sacrificed an anchor or fishing gear to avoid damaging a cable, they can be compensated.

Emily Martin

I find Article 115 quietly lovely. The law anticipates a captain who has to choose between his anchor and a cable he can't even see, and it says, cut the anchor, we'll make you whole. But then there are gaps. UNCLOS doesn't give universal jurisdiction over cable damage. And a private cable owner has no direct standing under international law. The owner has to rely on the ship's flag state to prosecute, or on bilateral diplomatic action.

Zach Martin

Let me say what that means in plain terms, and I'll label it as my reading. If a vessel flagged in one country drags an anchor across a cable landing in another, the company that owns the cable can't sue under the treaty. It has to hope two governments want to care. That's a lot of trust to put on the thing carrying a country's payments.

Emily Martin

And attribution can be messy, even in places with plenty of resources. Carnegie describes two submarine internet cables in the Baltic Sea that were disrupted in November 2024. European officials blamed Russia, and then the disruption was later attributed to a Chinese ship. Carnegie says intentional tampering is rare in Africa, though several incidents have been reported in Europe. The point isn't who did what. It's that figuring out who is responsible, and under whose law, is slow even when the cable is in a wealthy neighborhood.

Zach Martin

The last piece is planning, and it might be the most practical. Carnegie notes that cables share the ocean with fishing, shipping, oil, gas, wind, mining, dredging, marine tourism, research, and military activity. UNCLOS outlines rights and responsibilities, but it doesn't specify precise methods for coordinating those competing uses. And most coastal states don't have coordinated marine spatial planning, so unzoned bottom trawling, sand dredging, and anchoring in the approaches to major ports are all things that can happen right on top of a cable.

Emily Martin

Carnegie does mention a sign of progress. In Nigeria, after the 2024 West Africa outages, the Communications Commission engaged with the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency to develop a harmonized regulation for submarine cables. That's the telecom regulator and the ship regulator finally sitting at one table. The fishing industry is responsible for a significant number of cable cuts, and its regulators need to know where the cables are.

Zach Martin

So the architecture is this. At sea, the cable is free to cross, and protected on paper. At the beach, the country holds the keys. In between, there are gaps in enforcement and in planning. And now we get to the country that tests all of it. Sierra Leone arrived at this table late, and the reason is part of the story.

Emily Martin

Let's go back to 2011. Reuters filed a report from Freetown on October tenth, and the headline was that Sierra Leone would secure its first fiber optic connection to the outside world with the arrival of the ACE cable. The ministry of information said the vessel carrying the cable was within the country's shores, and that it would lay the cable at a landing station by Lumley Beach in western Freetown. The context Reuters gave is what stays with me. Sierra Leone was part of a dwindling group of countries still wholly reliant on highly expensive satellite bandwidth.

Zach Martin

And the reasons are historical. Sierra Leone was coming out of an eleven year civil war that ended in 2002. Earlier cables went down the West African coast, like SAT3, which landed in 2001, and Sierra Leone missed them, along with Liberia. Reuters quotes Senesie Kallon, deputy director general of the National Telecommunications Commission, who said, and I'm quoting, 'At that time we had a civil war, we didn't have the opportunity to articulate the arrangement to have a landing station here.' A country at war can't negotiate a cable consortium.

Emily Martin

So what did it cost to be late? Reuters gives numbers. According to the National Telecommunications Commission, the whole country had just a hundred and fifty five megabits of bandwidth, less than would serve a small American or European town. The World Bank estimated that bandwidth in Sierra Leone cost ten times the level in East Africa and twenty five times the American price. And barely one percent of a population of five point four million had access to internet services.

Zach Martin

Think about what a hundred and fifty five megabits means for a country. You can get that on a single fast home connection in a wealthy city. Here it was shared across a nation. And Reuters says numerous studies have identified cheap, fast internet as a factor that can boost economic growth. So the cost of missing the cable wasn't only slower videos. It was a missing layer in the economy, the layer that banks, schools, businesses, and government increasingly assume is there.

Emily Martin

The International Telecommunication Union said in August 2011 that nine African countries were still wholly dependent on satellite internet. Reuters lists them: Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Guinea, Liberia, São Tomé and Príncipe, and the Seychelles. So Sierra Leone wasn't alone, but it was in a small club that was shrinking fast. And the person who may have put the window in the clearest words was Vijay Pillai, the World Bank's country manager in Freetown. He said, 'There was an opportunity to connect Sierra Leone to ACE in 2011 and if the country were to miss that it wasn't clear there'd be further opportunities.'

Zach Martin

That's a statement about timing in infrastructure. Some doors open once. The World Bank put in thirty million dollars, through the West Africa Regional Communications Infrastructure Program, which people shorten to WARCIP, to fund the connection of Sierra Leone to the cable offshore. That's the piece that paid for getting from the ACE trunk line to the beach at Lumley.

Emily Martin

Let me flag something about dates, because the sources tell the story in stages. Reuters reported the vessel docking in October 2011. A Telecompaper report in June 2012 still said the cable would land in Sierra Leone in October of that year and become operational then, citing the project coordinator for WARCIP, Julius Kamara, who said the government had secured World Bank funding to finish on schedule. And SubTel Forum shows WARCIP holding a press conference at the landing site on Lumley Beach Road in late September 2012. The ACE system as a whole entered service on December fifteenth, 2012. I wouldn't lean on a single day. It's a project that arrived in phases.

Zach Martin

Phases is a good word. And the system that arrived is big. ACE is about seventeen thousand kilometers long, running from Penmarch in France down to South Africa, serving twenty four countries. It's managed by a consortium of twenty members that invested around seven hundred million dollars, sometimes with World Bank support. It was manufactured by Alcatel Submarine Networks and laid by ships from that company and Orange Marine. And Wikipedia's summary says ACE was the first international submarine cable to land in several countries, including Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Sierra Leone.

Emily Martin

Here's a detail I find interesting about the physical thing. Wikipedia's technical summary says the design capacity was raised from twelve point eight terabits per second to twenty terabits per second, while the lit capacity was one point six terabits per second. I'd treat that as indicative, since we don't have a date on the figure. But it makes a point. The glass is not the scarce thing. The glass can carry much more than is lit. What's scarce is everything around it: the landing station, the business arrangements, the terrestrial network that moves the data inland.

Zach Martin

We'll come back to that, because it's one of the big lessons. But now the part that carries the risk. Look at the TeleGeography Submarine Cable Map, which is a free, regularly updated resource. Its page for Freetown, Sierra Leone, lists the submarine cables landing there. One entry. Africa Coast to Europe. That's it. The country's entire subsea connection is one cable at one landing point.

Emily Martin

Our brief for this episode states it directly. Sierra Leone relies entirely on that single physical cable, with no secondary subsea cable landing. That leaves the national economy exposed to breaks upstream, wherever on those seventeen thousand kilometers they happen, and to disruptions at the landing itself. There's a useful comparison in the Carnegie paper. It says the lack of diversity in subsea cable numbers and routes has led to overreliance on single path connectivity, which is particularly true for countries with only one cable landing, and it names Guinea, Guinea Bissau, The Gambia, Liberia, and Mauritania.

Zach Martin

Sierra Leone isn't on Carnegie's list of names, but the list says 'including,' and the TeleGeography page tells the same story. So when I say Sierra Leone sits in the single cable club, I'm leaning on that map and on the creator's brief, not only on one paper.

Emily Martin

And think about what a single cable means as a trade route. If you imagine a port town that depends on one road, with one bridge on that road, then the bridge isn't just infrastructure. It's the whole town's economic exposure. A route creates value when it's used and creates risk when nothing else can substitute for it. Sierra Leone went from satellite dependence, which was expensive but diversified in the sense that it didn't hang on one physical thread, to a much cheaper and faster connection that hangs on exactly one.

Zach Martin

That's not an argument against the cable. The cable was a huge win. It's an argument about what comes after the win. A coach would say, you've built the first habit, and now you've got to protect it. And in March 2018, the habit got tested.

Zach Martin

March thirtieth, 2018. A part of the ACE cable was damaged near Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania. The analysis comes from Dyn, the internet infrastructure firm now part of Oracle, and it was written up by a team led by David Berson. Ten of the twenty two countries drawing on ACE were hit. And one of the signals at the time came from Sierra Leone Cable Limited, SALCAB, which posted that the data connection to Sierra Leone was partly down because of the ACE cable cut in Nouakchott. That happened to be during the week of the country's national election.

Emily Martin

Dyn's charts are specific. Sierra Leone's connectivity recovered a little from the failure on March thirtieth, and then on April first the network was completely disconnected. Mauritania, the closest to the damage, nearly stopped for about three days. Our brief describes Mauritania and Sierra Leone as virtually dark for nearly forty eight hours. Those two descriptions aren't identical, and I'd say they reflect different ways of measuring. Either way, the picture is a country in the dark for days.

Zach Martin

And here's the part that's most useful. Liberia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea, and Gambia were less affected. Dyn's explanation is that those four used terrestrial links and satellite connections in addition to the submarine cable, while Sierra Leone and Mauritania depended heavily on ACE. Benin was even less affected, with SAT3 plus terrestrial and satellite, so the hit to its domestic network was under a tenth of what it might have been. Berson's conclusion was that the failure highlighted the countries' dependence on ACE, and that West African providers should add international redundancy through terrestrial networks and satellite.

Emily Martin

That's 2018. Now March 2024, which is a different animal. On March fourteenth, a suspected underwater rock slide off the coast of Côte d'Ivoire took four cables offline at once: ACE, SAT3, the West Africa Cable System, and MainOne. The creator's brief places it off Abidjan and describes it as possibly a turbidity current in an undersea canyon. The Internet Society's report says suspected rock slide, and Carnegie attributes the outage to seismic activity. So the cause is described as suspected, and the sources differ in the detail.

Zach Martin

The Internet Society counts thirteen African countries affected, with degraded service or near total outages: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, and Togo. Carnegie says ten countries lost connection, mostly in West and Southern Africa. Again, different counting, same event. And I want to flag something important. Sierra Leone is not on the Internet Society's list of thirteen.

Emily Martin

Right, and we shouldn't gloss over that. Our sources give us no account of how Sierra Leone fared on March fourteenth, 2024, so we're not going to say it went dark, because we can't show it. What we can say is that three single cable countries on that list, Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia, each show ACE as their only submarine cable in the Internet Society's table. Those are the countries that live in Sierra Leone's neighborhood of risk, and the lesson applies in the same way.

Zach Martin

What the Internet Society really identified is a design flaw, and I think it's the center of this episode. All four affected cables converge along the coast of Côte d'Ivoire, where the rock slide is reported to have happened. That makes the convergence point a single point of failure for four cables. They write that it's unclear whether other single points of failure exist where cables converge, and that submarine cable providers don't provide details about their routes, for what is believed to be security reasons.

Emily Martin

So think about how odd that is. A country can buy a cable and not be able to see the geography of its risk. The cable routes are kept confidential for security. But that confidentiality means that customers, regulators, and investors can't easily check whether four supposedly independent cables share a narrow corridor. The Internet Society notes that the incident was unique because multiple cables were damaged through their convergence at a single physical point, while most outages usually affect individual cables.

Zach Martin

The money number from that week is huge. Carnegie reports that the cable cuts in West Africa cost Nigeria over five hundred and ninety million dollars in four days. Our brief puts it at five hundred and ninety three point six million. For scale, the repair of one cable is estimated at around two million dollars, and Carnegie estimates the four cable repair at around eight million. So the outage cost Nigeria's economy something like seventy times what it cost to fix the cables. Again, that's my arithmetic on two estimates, but the asymmetry is the point.

Emily Martin

And the asymmetry shows up in who was protected. Countries with submarine cable diversity could maintain a level of uptime, says the Internet Society. In its table, South Africa has nine cable systems and Nigeria has seven, along with four and seven internet exchange points respectively. Google's Equiano cable doesn't terminate in Côte d'Ivoire and was vital to keeping several countries up. Local operators used cross border terrestrial fiber to reroute traffic to Equiano, which saw a fourfold increase in traffic. Carnegie adds that a cross border circuit from Togo into Ghana and Benin helped restore traffic, using the Equiano landing in Lomé.

Zach Martin

So the lifeboat was a different cable that took a different path, plus the roads between countries. There's also a useful detail about Niger, which is landlocked. It kept uptime over satellite and terrestrial fiber through Burkina Faso into Benin. And a different kind of ripple: Microsoft reported outages of its services in the EMEA region on March fourteenth, and countries in Africa that weren't directly hit by the cable outage still couldn't use services like Teams and Office 365 until Microsoft rerouted later that day. Your outage can come from somebody else's cable.

Emily Martin

Then there's the clock, which is the part nobody can negotiate with. Operators gave repair estimates. SAT3 from March twenty ninth to April fifth. ACE from April fourth to the fourteenth. The West Africa Cable System from April twenty fifth to May fifth. MainOne from May fifth to May sixteenth. The first repair ship that responded arrived after three weeks, according to Carnegie. Our brief says the repairs ran nearly two months, with final restorations in May.

Zach Martin

And the reason it takes that long is that there are very few ships. Carnegie says there are fewer than a hundred cable repair ships globally, and only three serve the African continent. Only one of those, the Léon Thévenin, is based at a port along the African coast. Our brief says that ship is operated by Orange Marine and stationed at Cape Town, and that in 2024 it and the UK based CS Sovereign needed several weeks just to reach the site. In 2023, when two cables serving Southern Africa were severed off the Democratic Republic of Congo, the ship was already deployed on other work.

Emily Martin

Add the cost. Carnegie puts a typical cable repair at one to three million dollars, involving specialized ships with highly trained crews that cost tens of thousands of dollars per day, plus permits and replacement cable. So a country on a single cable is relying on a repair fleet that, for the whole continent, you could fit in a small marina. That's an interpretation, but the numbers support it. The route is only as dependable as the time it takes a ship to reach it.

Zach Martin

Put it together and we have the structure of risk. A single cable, a hazard concentrated in shallow water or at a convergence point, a repair fleet that's thin, and an economy that's increasingly built on top. If you were advising a team, you wouldn't say eliminate the risk. You'd say shorten the recovery. The question for Sierra Leone then becomes who is responsible for doing that, and who owns the beach where the cable lands.

Emily Martin

The beach at Lumley is a piece of state property, and for most of the last decade, the question of who should run it has been a public argument. Let's go through what the sources say. SALCAB, the Sierra Leone Cable Limited, was the state entity that controls the country's internet gateway. According to the Sierra Leone Telegraph, in an article by Amin Kef Sesay from September 2020, it operated under a public private partnership model from 2011 to 2013, which didn't benefit the institution. Between 2013 and 2014, the government revoked the equity of private individuals and refunded the capital contributed by the private partners. The government has operated the landing station itself since 2014.

Zach Martin

And the numbers in that article are sobering. SALCAB closed its 2017 financial year with a negative cash flow of three hundred and twenty seven million leones. In 2018 it carried a liability of nine point seven billion leones, from loan repayments, vendor payments for spare parts, and related items. The document the article cites describes debt exposure of over six point seven million dollars. Our brief ties that to commercial operators defaulting on their operating expense obligations and weak revenue recovery.

Emily Martin

The director general, Ishmael Kebbay, wrote in a January 2020 letter, quoted by the Telegraph, that the public private partnership model was, and I'll quote, 'a slippery-slope for Government of Sierra Leone.' He said the operators were not meeting their operating expense obligations and were only after the direct benefit of extracting bandwidth while the facility almost perished. Those are the words of a manager making the case for his proposal, so we should treat them as an argument, not a verdict. But the pattern he describes is one that investors know: the party who captures the revenue doesn't want to fund the maintenance.

Zach Martin

The proposal was to lease the operation. In a letter cited by the Telegraph, SALCAB described a lease operation model in which the third party bears the cost of operation, maintenance, administrative and commercial costs of the landing station, and gives SALCAB a monthly fixed revenue. The government would have no operational cost exposure or capital expenditure. In exchange, a private operator would absorb the staff and run sales and marketing. It's a pretty classic handoff, and the question is what you're handing off along with the costs.

Emily Martin

That's exactly where the politics bit. The National Public Procurement Authority didn't approve selective or restrictive procurement and recommended an open tender instead. Then the Minister of Information and Communications, Mohamed Rado Swarray, stepped in and ordered the privatization process put on hold. He was concerned that entrusting the whole operation to a private entity could compromise national security. He said SALCAB was not for sale, but it would be unbundled, with government handling the security side while a private company managed the commercial operations.

Zach Martin

Our brief picks up the story from there. In 2020 and 2021, the government unbundled SALCAB to separate the physical landing operations from national policy, and leased the landing station and international gateway management to a private operator, Zoodlabs (SL) Limited. Crunchbase describes Zoodlabs as a private Freetown company with eleven to fifty employees that manages an ACE landing station and provides wholesale bandwidth to internet service providers and mobile operators. That headcount is from a data profile, so take it as indicative.

Emily Martin

It's worth noticing the tension in the logic. The minister's idea was to keep security with the state and hand commercial operations to a private firm. But on a landing station, operations and security are tangled together. The people who maintain the equipment, manage the power, and control the access are the ones who can also keep the lights on or off. Whether that's workable is an open question, and the controversy the brief describes, over whether surrendering gateway infrastructure compromised sovereignty and security, sits right on that line.

Zach Martin

And then there's the fiscal aftermath. In January 2025, according to our brief, Sierra Leone's Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee, acting on Audit Service findings, agreed a debt recovery resolution with Zoodlabs to repay seven hundred and sixty thousand dollars in unremitted liabilities to the state, in monthly installments of sixty thousand dollars. That works out to a bit over twelve and a half months of payments, which is my arithmetic. The Sierra Leone Telegraph also ran an opinion piece in August 2024 by Mackie M. Jalloh calling the Zoodlabs contract a symbol of mismanagement. That's one writer's opinion, and we aren't adjudicating it.

Emily Martin

What I take from this is a pattern, not a villain. First, the state ran the gateway and struggled to make it pay. Then a partnership model, then state control again, then a lease. Each model tried to solve one problem and left another. Whoever sits on the beach, the arrangement has to answer three things: who pays for spare parts, who holds the security, and who can see the full picture of the route. And a thin balance sheet at the gateway matters, because the landing station is also where backup power, maintenance, and quick repairs come from.

Zach Martin

Now the lesson I promised earlier, about the beach being a bottleneck. Carnegie describes three stages. The first mile is the undersea cable. The middle mile is the terrestrial network, like national backbones. The last mile connects the end user through mobile or fixed broadband. And Carnegie adds a fourth thing, the invisible mile, which is governance. Landing a high capacity cable doesn't lower prices or deliver broadband inland if the middle mile is missing, underfunded, or monopolized. The bandwidth just piles up at the beach.

Emily Martin

And SALCAB's own plan reflects that. Under the unbundling, it was to recalibrate toward an open access terrestrial fiber network, a passive network for backhaul and distribution connecting cities and towns, and supporting operators to move large amounts of data cheaper and faster. In 2019, SALCAB officials told reporters of a program called Project One Access, to take connectivity to five hundred schools and colleges and fifteen public hospitals. We don't have results in our sources, so I'll leave it as a plan.

Zach Martin

Zoom out to the biggest shift in the business. For years, African cables were financed by consortia of telecom operators and multilateral lenders. ACE, with its seven hundred million dollars and World Bank support, is that model. Carnegie says that over the past ten years there's been a notable transition from African telecom companies and governments to major international technology firms. Meta, Google, and Amazon now have privately owned cables arriving on the African coast. The 2Africa consortium, for instance, includes Meta alongside Orange, Vodafone, China Mobile International, and others.

Emily Martin

The upside is real. Google projected that its Equiano cable could raise internet penetration in Nigeria and South Africa by seven percentage points and in Namibia by nine between 2021 and 2025, and it projected 1.6 million jobs in Nigeria. Those are Google's own projections, and we should say so. But in March 2024, Equiano's value wasn't a forecast. It was a path that stayed open when four others closed. New cables with modern branch design add exactly the diversity that single cable countries lack.

Zach Martin

The flip side is concentration, and this is interpretation, not fact from our sources. When global cloud and content companies own the cables, the leverage shifts. A consortium of national operators had members in each landing country with a stake in local outcomes. A hyperscaler has a global network to optimize. For a country like Sierra Leone, the questions become: does the next cable come, does it land in Freetown or somewhere else, and on whose terms? That's why the policy ideas matter.

Emily Martin

The policy agenda is fairly consistent across the sources. The Internet Society says Africa needs more submarine and terrestrial cables, diverse landing points, locally cached content, and internet exchange points that let local traffic continue when the outside connection breaks. It lists projects like the 2Africa cable, the Trans Sahara backbone, and the Djoliba cable, designed to connect Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal, and it mentions Starlink as an alternative where licensed. Carnegie recommends route diversification, secure and diversified landing stations, cross border circuits, incident playbooks, and a single point of contact for incident reporting, a recommendation from the International Cable Protection Committee.

Zach Martin

Our brief adds that the African Union, the International Telecommunication Union, and regional bodies like the West Africa Telecommunications Regulatory Assembly have called for harmonized cable regulations, designated marine cable corridors, coordination with maritime security forces, and legal classification of subsea cables as critical national infrastructure. Notice what's on that list. It isn't glamorous. It's corridors, contacts, and playbooks. Discipline and small improvements, compounding. That's how you take a single thread and turn it into a net.

Emily Martin

So here's where I'd leave it. In Episode 1, we said the ocean is a balance sheet. This episode adds a line that's easy to miss. The most valuable thing crossing Sierra Leone's ocean isn't a fish or a barrel. It's data, and it travels in a hose the width of a garden hose, landing on one beach, run by an arrangement that has changed hands more than once. The value is large, the exposure is concentrated, and the fix is a mix of cables, roads, laws, and boats.

Zach Martin

That's Ocean Capital Desk, an IRHUB Media and KMKT original, part of The Invisible Economy series. Everything here is for information and discussion, and it is not investment advice. Next time you load a page, remember where the line starts. It's the country you don't see.