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For coastal nations, access to submarine fibre optic cables is often taken for granted. These undersea networks carry approximately 95% of intercontinental internet traffic,1 forming the invisible backbone of the global digital economy. Yet for landlocked countries, particularly in Africa, the absence of direct access to these critical lines makes ensuring reliable data flow a complex infrastructure challenge that demands innovative solutions.
Ethiopia exemplifies both the obstacles and opportunities facing landlocked nations in the digital age. With a population exceeding 130 million2 and ambitious development targets outlined in the Digital Ethiopia 2025 strategy, the country has been compelled to reimagine how reliable connectivity can be achieved without coastal access. The approaches being pioneered in landlocked markets are reshaping traditional assumptions about network resilience and redundancy.
The Landlocked Connectivity Challenge
16 African countries lack territorial access to the sea, forcing them to depend entirely on neighbouring nations for international connectivity.3 This dependency creates substantial economic and technical challenges. Landlocked African countries can pay significantly more for international connectivity than their coastal counterparts, while geographical conditions such as natural barriers and distance from submarine cable landing points impact data routing efficiency and bandwidth benefits. Research indicates this gap has narrowed through strategic partnerships and infrastructure investments, though disparities remain.
For Ethiopia specifically, the country owns approximately 22,000 km of fibre-optic cable spanning the nation as of 2025,4 with cross-border fibre links reaching undersea internet cables primarily through Djibouti, which hosts undersea cable landing stations on the Red Sea coast. Yet Ethiopia's median fixed broadband speed of 9.01 Mbps lags considerably behind regional leaders like Rwanda and South Africa, where mobile speeds exceed 40 Mbps.5 This performance gap directly impacts everything from business productivity to educational access, making robust redundancy strategies essential for economic development.
Regional Connectivity Networks: Building Resilience Through Cooperation
For landlocked nations, true connectivity resilience relies not only on individual infrastructure investments but also on strategic regional cooperation. By creating mesh networks with multiple pathways, traffic can reroute automatically during disruptions, ensuring continuity and reducing dependence on any single corridor.
In 2024 the “Horizon Fibre” initiative was formed which will create a multi-terabit, redundant terrestrial fibre link connecting Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Sudan.6 This project does more than enhance capacity, it fundamentally reshapes Ethiopia’s connectivity architecture, providing alternative routes to submarine cables.
By establishing a terrestrial network across these regions, the Horizon Fibre Initiative overcomes the limitations of submarine infrastructure, offering advantages in cost and maintenance. Terrestrial fibre is significantly cheaper to deploy than submarine cables, and its accessibility allows for faster, more efficient repairs.
Connectivity diversification extends beyond this project. In June 2025, Ethiopia and Kenya committed to completing cross-border fibre links, with Kenya’s backbone from Isiolo through Mandera to Djibouti projected to reach 89% coverage by 2028. This expansion could create 15,000 digital economy jobs and add $340 million to regional GDP, illustrating how multi-directional connectivity safeguards nations from disruption.7
Ultimately, true redundancy is achieved through diversity. Connecting national backbones to multiple neighbouring countries increases choice, reduces costs, and strengthens resilience, laying the groundwork for long-term digital growth across landlocked regions.
Localising Digital Infrastructure: Data Centres and Internet Exchange Points
For landlocked nations, modern data centres and Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) work together as critical infrastructure, reducing reliance on single providers and costly international bandwidth. By keeping traffic within national borders, these facilities improve performance, lower costs, and enhance network resilience.
Carrier-neutral data centres, where multiple network operators interconnect, have become strategic hubs rather than just hosting facilities. Wingu Africa’s launch of Ethiopia’s first carrier-neutral data centre transformed the landscape, enabling local and international carriers to exchange traffic and providing greater choice and flexibility for businesses. Tier III certification ensures 99.98% uptime with fully redundant systems that can be maintained without interrupting operations, making the facility a cornerstone of national digital infrastructure.
Operating at 10.2 MW after full phase implementation in Addis Ababa, Wingu Africa is pioneering digital infrastructure in a region historically underdeveloped in this sector, strengthening local connectivity and opening new economic opportunities. Across Africa, the data centre market is projected to nearly triple by 2030, driven by 5G rollout, renewable energy integration, and enterprise migration to colocation and managed cloud services. Carrier-neutral facilities encourage competition, offering better rates, diverse services, and reduced dependency on single providers.
Complementing data centres, IXPs provide the technical framework to keep local traffic within national borders. Ethiopia’s first IXP, ADDIX, hosted at Wingu’s Tier III facility in the ICT Park, has become a central component of the country’s digital ecosystem. Before ADDIX, locally hosted websites often required data to travel internationally before returning to Addis Ababa, creating latency and unnecessary bandwidth costs. ADDIX enables direct network interconnection, improving efficiency, service quality, and reliability.
Beyond technical performance, IXPs allow digital content to be stored and delivered locally, further reducing costs and strengthening service delivery. Ethiopia’s experience demonstrates how targeted investment in local traffic exchange can rapidly transform national connectivity, enhance resilience, and support broader digital growth.
Power Resilience: The Foundation of Connectivity in Landlocked Nations
Where physical access to global subsea cables is limited, data centres play a critical role in bridging the connectivity gap. Reliable local infrastructure ensures that digital services can be hosted and accessed without interruption, reducing dependence on cross-border data routes.
A key enabler of this resilience is power stability. Network redundancy is only as strong as the energy systems that support it. In markets where grid reliability can fluctuate, such as Ethiopia, data centres deploy uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), diesel generators, and redundant energy distribution networks to guarantee continuous operations. These measures ensure that mission-critical services such as cloud platforms, financial systems, and government databases, remain online even during grid instability, strengthening overall national connectivity.
The evolution of renewable energy in Africa adds a powerful dimension to this equation. In Ethiopia, hydropower from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam now underpins expanding digital infrastructure, offering both reliability and sustainability. Similarly, Kenya’s energy mix, already around 90% renewable8, demonstrates how clean energy can power data centres that anchor national and regional digital ecosystems. By aligning renewable generation with data centre growth, landlocked nations can secure the energy foundation needed for long-term digital resilience and connectivity independence.
The Path Forward
The experience of landlocked nations like Ethiopia shows that geography need not define digital destiny. Through strategic investments in diverse routing, carrier-neutral data centres, Internet Exchange Points, and regional cooperation, countries without coastal access are building resilient connectivity networks that rival those of many coastal states.
Ethiopia’s digital economy is projected to contribute over ETB 1.3 trillion to GDP by 2028,9 underscoring how decisions made today around broadband, power, cloud, and talent will shape the nation’s economic future for decades to come. These investments transcend technical considerations to become fundamental enablers of economic transformation.
The lessons from Ethiopia's connectivity journey offer broader insights. Redundancy cannot be achieved through single solutions but emerges from layered strategies combining physical infrastructure diversity, strategic partnerships, localised traffic exchange, and power resilience. For landlocked nations globally, these principles provide a roadmap for overcoming geographic constraints through deliberate infrastructure choices.
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