East Africa's data infrastructure runs north-south. Fibre comes inland from the Mombasa cable landing stations to Nairobi, then forks toward Kampala, Kigali, Juba and beyond. That topology has served the region well, but it means almost every landlocked network's international traffic rides the same corridor, and every network in the east of the DRC rides it longest. Paratus Group's announcement at ITW Africa 2026, confirmed by ITWeb Africa on 8 September, changes the geometry: the Goma-to-Mombasa (G2M) route (roughly 2,000 km of terrestrial fibre linking Goma via Kigali, Kampala and Nairobi to the Kenyan coast) is now live and carrying traffic.
What the G2M route actually is
The G2M is not a new submarine cable, it is the terrestrial artery that connects eastern DRC's traffic to the submarine cables that do land on the coast. Its path stitches together the region's established network geography: Goma in the east of the DRC, through Rwanda's Kigali, Uganda's Kampala and Kenya's Nairobi, terminating where the subsea systems come ashore. Paratus describes it as an important east-west connection providing access to international subsea cable capacity landing at Mombasa, and, critically, the route is not just lit fibre on a map. Paratus is complementing it with points of presence and interconnections at data centres and internet exchanges along the way, which is what turns a physical route into capacity a customer can actually buy.
The company behind it has been assembling this quietly. Paratus (a pan-African network operator with southern African roots) has been building East African presence through infrastructure, services and cross-border connections, recently added Starlink services in Uganda to its mix, and is represented in the region by group CTO Gert Duvenhage and Kenya country manager Joseph Kibwott. At ITW Africa 2026 in Nairobi this month, it is hosting the customers and partners the route was built for.
Why an east-west artery matters more than it sounds
The unglamorous truth about African bandwidth is that it fails in corollaries. Kenya's submarine capacity is extraordinary on paper (seven live cable systems land on the Kenyan coast, from SEACOM and TEAMS to the 16 Tbps PEACE route) but the region's terrestrial diversity has lagged. Cut or degrade the inland corridor and you learn exactly how much of the network was really diversified. Carnegie's April 2025 analysis put Mombasa's single-point-of-failure risk bluntly, and the concern compounds as traffic grows: our own infrastructure map shows nine cable systems (seven live, with Africa-1 landed and Daraja in development) converging on one coastal bottleneck.
The G2M adds three specific kinds of resilience:
- A second path to the sea for eastern DRC. Goma's networks have historically backhauled through long, fragile inland corridors. A purpose-built route to Mombasa shortens the path and, more importantly, diversifies it.
- Ring potential for the northern corridor. With G2M live alongside the established Kampala–Nairobi and Kigali–Kampala routes, operators can start building genuine rings, traffic that fails over between paths instead of waiting for a single fibre cut to be spliced.
- A deeper funnel for Mombasa's landing stations. Every new terrestrial feeder makes the coastal cluster (iColo's MBA1 with its 94 registered networks, MBA2 two kilometres from the beach manhole) more valuable as an interconnection destination rather than a transit waypoint.
The Kenyan angle: what it changes for data centres and buyers
For Kenya's data centre market, the G2M is quietly significant. Interconnection density, the metric we track on every directory entry, grows when more networks can reach more buildings over more paths. A live east-west feeder means DRC, Rwandan and Ugandan networks have one more reason to place points of presence in Nairobi's carrier-neutral facilities and at Mombasa's coastal sites, rather than simply transiting. More networks present means more peering, lower latency for regional traffic, and better economics for the Kenyan businesses buying transit behind them.
For buyers of connectivity in Kenya, the practical advice is unchanged but easier to execute: ask any provider how many diverse physical paths your traffic will take to the submarine cables, not just how many cables the provider "has access to". Routes like G2M are what make a good answer possible.
What to watch
Three signals will tell us whether the G2M becomes a load-bearing artery or another lit route on a map. First, whether Paratus lands wholesale and enterprise capacity deals along the corridor, the ITWeb report says the route is carrying traffic, but carrying whose traffic and at what volumes is the real test. Second, whether the region's internet exchanges (KIXP, RINEX, and Uganda's UIXP) see membership growth from DRC-facing networks, which would show the route being used for peering rather than pure transit. Third, whether it pressures the market toward more east-west builds, the region's next frontier is redundancy between corridors, not just along them. Our map now carries the G2M alongside the terrestrial backbone, and we will keep the connectivity explainers updated as the traffic story develops.