Kenya's international bandwidth is about to get a lot deeper. Two new submarine cable systems are heading for Mombasa over the next couple of years, adding to a landing station that already carries seven cables and handles the bulk of East Africa's traffic to the rest of the world. For an industry where every megabit of upstream capacity eventually shows up as a line item on a smaller ISP's wholesale bill, this is one of the more consequential infrastructure stories of the year.
Two new cables, two different backers
The first is a 4,108-kilometre system connecting Oman to Mombasa, built through a partnership between Safaricom and Meta's Edge Network Services, reportedly designed around 24 fibre pairs for substantial future capacity. It would be Safaricom's first independent subsea cable rather than capacity leased on a system run by someone else. The second, known as Africa-1, runs from France through Africa to the Middle East and is expected to reach Kenya next year. Airtel Kenya is also said to be preparing its own submarine cable activation, which would give the country three major telecom players each holding a direct stake in international capacity rather than just leasing it.
The bandwidth numbers behind the push
The timing tracks with real demand growth, not speculation. Kenya's available international internet bandwidth rose from 24,161 Gbps to 28,130 Gbps in the quarter ending March 2026 — a 16.4% jump in three months. Mobile broadband subscriptions have climbed past 84 million, and quarterly data consumption is now well over 800 million GB. Cloud services, AI-related workloads, and video traffic keep pushing usage up faster than existing capacity was built to absorb, which is exactly the kind of pressure that makes operators willing to fund a cable outright instead of just buying a slice of one.
Why this matters beyond the big carriers
More international capacity doesn't just make the big telecoms' networks faster — it changes the wholesale market smaller ISPs actually buy into. Kenya currently relies heavily on a handful of systems, several operated by Telkom Kenya, which has meant limited alternative routes and pricing shaped by whoever controls the landing station. Two additional cables funded by different companies means more competing sellers of upstream capacity, which historically pushes wholesale bandwidth pricing down over time — even if the effect takes a few quarters to reach retail rates. There's a real tension worth naming here too: as major operators build and own their own cables, they also gain more direct control over upstream pricing, so how much of that benefit reaches smaller ISPs will depend on how competitive the wholesale market stays.
There's a parallel development worth watching alongside this: state-linked infrastructure like Kenya Pipeline Company's planned fibre rollout across 18 towns is aimed at giving smaller providers alternative terrestrial routes to reach the coast, rather than depending entirely on the dominant players' networks end to end. Combined with new subsea capacity, that's the kind of shift that widens where a regional ISP can realistically compete on price.
What it means for how you run the business side
More available bandwidth is only useful if the systems behind it can turn growth into revenue without turning into more manual work. As wholesale capacity opens up and it becomes more viable for regional ISPs to expand into new towns or offer more competitive packages, the operational basics matter more, not less:
- Billing that scales with subscriber growth. Cheaper upstream bandwidth is an invitation to grow the customer base — and spreadsheet billing or manual M-Pesa reconciliation breaks down well before a few hundred clients.
- Real-time enforcement. Adding capacity to serve new areas means more PPPoE and hotspot clients to manage, and disconnect/reconnect needs to happen automatically based on payment status, not a technician's schedule.
- Multi-currency and mobile money readiness. As regional capacity improves, expansion beyond a single town or country becomes more realistic, and billing infrastructure needs to be ready for that before the growth arrives, not after.
XpressRADIUS is built for exactly that moment — real-time RADIUS control tied directly to M-Pesa and Kopo Kopo payments, so that when cheaper bandwidth makes expansion possible, the billing system isn't the bottleneck holding it back.
Planning to grow as Kenya's bandwidth market opens up? See how XpressRADIUS handles billing and network control at scale.
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