Phase3 and Sonatel have activated a new terrestrial fibre route stretching 3,500km from Lagos, Nigeria, to Dakar, Senegal.
The route will provide scalable, low-latency connectivity, boosting cloud and content capacity across West Africa.
This collaboration marks the next phase of Phase3’s East-West fibre expansion, extending its Lagos-Accra corridor to reach Dakar, one of West Africa’s key digital hubs. This will provide a high-performance, land-based alternative to subsea systems, achieving latency as low as 32ms, and a much-needed layer of resilience for a region heavily impacted by the 2024 cable disruptions.
“This isn’t just a route, it’s a digital spine for West Africa,” said Stanley Jegede, Executive Chairman of Phase 3. “We’ve created a secure, high-capacity terrestrial path linking Dakar to Lagos while interconnecting our major platforms.”
By bridging networks through Benin, Togo, Ghana, and now through to Senegal, the new terrestrial path provides critical redundancy for hyperscalers, content networks, financial institutions, governments, and cloud providers. It also expands the Djoliba network from Ghana into Nigeria, while laying groundwork for Ikasira, Sonatel’s next-generation regional platform.
“We’ve designed this network for hyperscalers, CDNs, and operators that can’t afford downtime,” said Craig Lowe, Chief Growth Officer at Phase 3. “This is about data sovereignty, application performance, and cloud transformation. And most importantly, it’s about building an internet that doesn’t fail when the cables do.”
The route is engineered for financial services, enterprise cloud workloads, public sector digitisation, and media streaming, ensuring cross-border interoperability and local access to cloud zones like AWS Wavelength, hosted by Sonatel in Dakar. It also helps reduce exposure to future subsea outages, supporting national digital strategies across the region.
El Hadji Maty Sene, Managing Director of Sonatel Wholesale and International, added: “Dakar is emerging as a strategic connectivity hub for West Africa. With this route, clients benefit from diversified infrastructure, lower latency, and reliable access to global content.”
