Africa’s connectivity narrative continues to revolve around two dominant infrastructure layers: fibre rollout and mobile network expansion. One measures kilometres deployed; the other, population coverage and subscriber growth. Neither fully explains whether today’s networks can sustain the volume, speed, and complexity of traffic now running through them.
The continent’s terrestrial fibre footprint has surpassed approximately 2.1 million kilometres, with around 1.3 million kilometres currently active, according to the Africa Broadband Outlook 2024 . Roughly 58,000 kilometres of new fibre entered service in the twelve months to June 2024 alone, including Airtel Africa’s expansion to more than 81,500 kilometres across 14 markets.
At the distribution level, a May 2025 Xalam Analytics market brief indicates that last-mile fibre now passes more than 18 million homes and businesses across Africa. Yet connection density remains heavily concentrated in commercial corridors and major urban centres, leaving a vast distribution gap.
This reveals a stark operational disconnect: coverage is not capacity.
In this #TechTalkThursday, we examine the backhaul layer shaping Africa’s digital economy, and why high-capacity wireless backhaul is now a critical strategic priority where physical fibre cannot scale fast enough, cheaply enough, or far enough.
The Layer Between RAN and Reality
In many secondary towns and peri-urban areas, the backhaul infrastructure connecting mobile towers has not evolved in tandem with the radio access layer, even as networks begin carrying far more demanding forms of traffic.
Part of the shift comes from the rise of cloud systems, AI workloads, fintech platforms, enterprise applications, and digitised public services, all of which require sustained throughput and low latency rather than basic access alone.
At AfricaCom 2025, Joe Marsella described how AI infrastructure is reshaping network traffic patterns globally:
“Every single day there is a new press release about a new AI data factory or AI data centre being built here, there, and everywhere. All those factories are generating enormous amounts of data, and that data is not just moving within data centres anymore. It is moving across data centres.”
— Joe Marsella, VP International Business Development, Ciena
Transport infrastructure now has to sustain that cross-data-centre movement at scale. Radio access network investments begin to lose efficiency when the backhaul layer behind them becomes a bottleneck.
Vodacom Group’s CEO Shameel Joosub framed the issue more broadly:
“Africa is still significantly lacking in fibre infrastructure, so fibre, mobile, and even satellite all need to be part of the ecosystem. That full ecosystem is necessary for us to realise the benefits of AI across all parts of the continent.”
— Shameel Joosub, CEO, Vodacom Group
The operational imperative is no longer a single-layer rollout. Supporting enterprise cloud systems, fintech platforms, and AI workloads increasingly requires coordination across multiple transport technologies.
Where Fibre Deployment Starts Slowing Down
Fibre remains the backbone of Africa’s digital infrastructure buildout. But the economics of deployment change sharply once networks move beyond dense urban corridors.
Long-distance trenching, municipal rights-of-way negotiations, permitting delays, and difficult terrain all increase deployment costs and timelines. As infrastructure extends deeper into lower-density markets, fibre-only expansion models become harder to sustain commercially.
Older wireless approaches, including fixed LTE and WiMAX, struggled to gain traction because they could not consistently deliver the throughput and latency modern enterprise and consumer applications required.
A newer generation of high-capacity wireless backhaul is now changing this equation.
As Jean-Philippe Fournier of Spectronite noted:
“High-speed wireless backhaul offers a fast-to-deploy alternative to traditional fibre projects, delivering high capacity at lower CAPEX.”
— Jean-Philippe Fournier, CEO and Founder, Spectronite
The significance of that model is not that wireless replaces fibre. It is that it changes the deployment equation in markets where fibre expansion alone cannot move at the required speed or cost.
This is also where large infrastructure investments begin to make more strategic sense. Airtel’s 81,500-kilometre terrestrial network expansion strengthens the wholesale backbone layer, but extending usable capacity beyond that backbone increasingly requires different deployment models closer to the edge. At AfricaCom 2025, Openserve’s Amu Maja described how operators are beginning to separate urban and rural infrastructure strategies:
“In urban and metro areas, facilities are already available. The focus there is on creating scale to support AI, cloud services, and all the digital innovations taking place. In rural and semi-rural areas, the approach is different. The goal is inclusion and providing access to these communities while offering flexibility in the value proposition.”
— Amu Maja, Executive: Carrier and Global Business, Openserve
This dual approach reflects a broader industry reality: networks are no longer expanding under a single deployment logic. Capacity-heavy urban corridors and lower-density rural markets increasingly require different infrastructure models.
The Shift from Expansion to Resilience
As networks mature, the transport layer is also becoming a resilience discussion.
Fibre cuts caused by road construction, flooding, theft, and accidental damage remain one of the most persistent operational risks facing operators across the continent. A network dependent on a single physical route has limited fallback options when that line fails.
That reality is accelerating the move toward hybrid architectures that combine fibre with high-capacity wireless backhaul. The objective is continuity. In practical terms, when fibre is disrupted, traffic must be rerouted without significant service degradation.
This matters because digital systems increasingly depend on continuous uptime. Enterprise cloud services, digital financial platforms, and government systems are less tolerant of outages than earlier generations of internet usage.
Market behaviour is already reflecting that shift. When Starlink entered Kenya, satellite subscriptions rose sharply, driven largely by users seeking alternatives to unreliable terrestrial connectivity in underserved areas.
The implication for operators is clear. Metrics such as latency, uptime, and redundancy now carry equal weight to coverage statistics.
Rethinking Infrastructure Priorities
Despite these shifts, infrastructure policy and investment frameworks still tend to treat fibre kilometres deployed as the primary measure of digital progress. While useful as a construction metric, it does not capture service resilience, deployment speed, or effective capacity at the network edge.
For high-capacity wireless backhaul to scale effectively, governments will need clearer spectrum allocation frameworks alongside faster site approvals and simplified permitting processes.
Development finance models will also need to evolve beyond trenching-focused assessments and place greater weight on operational efficiency, redundancy, and time-to-service outcomes.
Africa’s connectivity challenge is no longer defined purely by whether infrastructure exists. The more pressing question is whether networks can sustain the scale and complexity of modern digital demand.
Fibre remains foundational. But increasingly, wireless backhaul is emerging as the layer that allows fibre-based networks to extend capacity faster, more flexibly, and with greater resilience across markets where fibre alone cannot scale efficiently enough.
