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On February 4, 2026, Ethio Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, and Sudatel Group signed the Horizon Fiber tripartite agreement in Djibouti, marking yet another infrastructure milestone in a region familiar with ribbon-cutting ceremonies. However, beneath this ceremonial announcement lies a significant shift in how the Horn of Africa perceives connectivity, sovereignty, and regional integration. Horizon Fiber is not merely a cable; it represents a pivotal test of whether African operators can collaboratively design strategic digital corridors on their own terms, linking them to continental initiatives like the AfCFTA.
This feature explores Horizon Fiber as a landmark in regional infrastructure, focusing on five key dimensions: the terrestrial connectivity corridor, its role as a geopolitical and economic catalyst, the partnership paradigm, digital sovereignty considerations, and its alignment with Ethio Telecom’s “Next Horizon: Digital & Beyond 2028” strategy.
From Water to Land: A Terrestrial Connectivity Corridor
For the past two decades, East Africa’s international bandwidth narrative has primarily unfolded offshore, with undersea cables landing in Djibouti, Mombasa, and Port Sudan, supplying national backbones further inland. The Horizon Fiber Initiative signifies a deliberate shift from exclusive reliance on submarine routes to a high-capacity terrestrial corridor that connects these landing stations across borders: Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
Strategically, this terrestrial corridor achieves three key objectives:
First, it reduces vulnerability at the Red Sea chokepoint, where security incidents, anchor cuts, and geopolitical tensions have highlighted the fragility of depending solely on subsea routes. By establishing a multi-terabit, low-latency land path between Red Sea gateways, Horizon Fiber provides redundancy for traffic between the Horn, the Gulf, and onward to Europe and Asia.
Second, it transforms Ethiopia from a “dead end” into a transit state. Historically, Ethiopia’s connectivity has been heavily reliant on Djibouti’s landing stations. Horizon repositions Ethiopia as a bridge rather than just a destination, facilitating traffic flow between Sudan and Djibouti and, by extension, connecting Central and East Africa to the global backbone.
Third, it enables multi-route engineering. Operators, hyperscalers, and content delivery networks increasingly require diverse terrestrial paths to optimize latency, resilience, and cost. A robust Djibouti–Addis–Khartoum corridor allows traffic to be dynamically rerouted around disruptions, whether in the Red Sea, Suez, or within any national network.
In technical terms, Horizon serves as a backbone. In strategic terms, it functions as a corridor—physical infrastructure capable of transporting not just data packets, but also trade, investment, and influence.
Geopolitical and Economic Catalyst for AfCFTA
The logic of Horizon Fiber aligns closely with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), where a single market necessitates not only roads and customs unions but also digital highways that minimize the costs and friction associated with cross-border commerce.
A terrestrial corridor of this nature can catalyze the AfCFTA in several ways:
Lowering regional Internet transit costs. By interconnecting the infrastructures of three incumbent operators, Horizon can create competitive wholesale routes compared to single-country backbones that resell international capacity at a premium. If the project is priced and regulated with transparency, ISPs and data-intensive enterprises in the region could access cheaper and more reliable transit options, essential for facilitating digital trade.
Supporting cross-border platforms. Cloud services, fintech, e-commerce, and content distribution networks rely on predictable, low-latency connections across markets. A resilient Horn corridor provides regional platforms—from payment processors to data centers—a robust backbone for scaling operations across Djibouti, Ethiopia, Sudan, and further into landlocked markets.
Strengthening bargaining power. Collective ownership of a strategic route empowers African operators to negotiate with hyperscalers and global carriers from a stronger position, offering them access to multiple hinterlands through a single, African-controlled gateway instead of fragmented national deals.
In a region where geopolitics often revolves around port access and military bases, a shared digital corridor introduces a new form of leverage: the ability to route global data flows through African-managed infrastructure, with significant regulatory, economic, and security implications.
From Competition to Innovation Partnerships
One of the most significant aspects of Horizon Fiber is not the fiber itself, but the language used by its architects to describe their collaboration. Ethio Telecom’s CEO, Frehiwot Tamru, characterized the project as “a shared digital future,” emphasizing that by combining infrastructure assets and technical expertise, African operators can “solve real connectivity challenges and unlock new value” for customers and hyperscalers. Djibouti Telecom’s CEO, Mohamed Assoweh Bouh, focused on “shared prosperity” and digital sovereignty, while Sudatel’s CEO, Magdi M. Abdalla Taha, referred to Horizon as “a living model of innovative partnership” and “a replicable benchmark” for the continent.
This rhetoric signals a paradigm shift from pure market competition to “innovation partnerships” in at least three ways:
Asset pooling instead of duplication. Rather than each operator constructing parallel, competing corridors with limited usage, Horizon proposes a collaboratively designed route that utilizes existing ducts, rights-of-way, and national backbones. This could enhance asset efficiency and reduce the long-term unit cost of capacity.
Shared risk in a high-capital environment. Terrestrial cross-border fiber is capital-intensive and politically sensitive. By sharing risk and capital expenditures, the three state-linked incumbents can undertake a project that might be individually prohibitive, especially given foreign exchange constraints and domestic investment priorities.
Signaling to regulators and financiers. The partnership model communicates to multilateral lenders, development finance institutions, and private investors that African incumbents can coordinate on regional public goods, not just local markets. This could facilitate the blending of concessional finance, vendor credit, and commercial capital into similar corridors elsewhere.
The risk, however, is that such alliances could solidify into regional cartels, limiting access for smaller players. The extent to which Horizon evolves into an open, neutral platform—or a closed club—will determine whether it fosters competition or merely consolidates the power of incumbents.
Digital Sovereignty Through Co-Ownership
Horizon Fiber is also part of a broader discussion about digital sovereignty: the capacity of states and regions to control critical digital infrastructure, standards, and data flows rather than ceding them entirely to foreign carriers and platforms.
By co-owning a strategic corridor that connects them directly to global cable systems, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan gain several sovereignty advantages:
Control over routing and redundancy. They can prioritize resilience for their own markets during disruptions, rather than relying solely on the commercial decisions of foreign carriers.
Regulatory jurisdiction. Traffic transiting the corridor falls under the regulatory and legal frameworks of the three states, which is significant for data protection, lawful interception, and cybersecurity policy.
Strategic autonomy in vendor choices. A jointly engineered corridor may mitigate vendor risk if the partners consciously avoid single-vendor lock-in, although this will depend on procurement decisions that have not yet been fully revealed.
However, digital sovereignty is not absolute. Submarine cables landing in Djibouti and Port Sudan remain critical chokepoints often financed or controlled by non-African consortia. Major content and cloud providers continue to operate on global architectures and may insist on their own routing preferences. Thus, Horizon Fiber should be viewed as incremental sovereignty: an important step toward African agency in infrastructure, but one that still functions within a global ecosystem dominated by external capital and technology.
Ethio Telecom’s “Next Horizon” and the Regional Pivot
For Ethio Telecom, Horizon Fiber is explicitly positioned as a cornerstone of its “Next Horizon: Digital & Beyond 2028” strategy. This roadmap aims to transform the company from a domestic incumbent into “a globally competitive, regionally diversified, and digitally empowered enterprise” that extends beyond connectivity into platforms, ecosystems, and regional solutions.
The Horizon corridor advances this vision along several key dimensions:
Transit Hub Status. By facilitating international traffic between Sudan and Djibouti and consolidating demand from landlocked neighbors, Ethiopia can establish itself as a regional transit hub. Ethio Telecom will serve as a wholesaler and platform operator, moving beyond the role of a national telecom provider.
Platform for New Services. High-capacity, low-latency regional fiber is essential for data centers, cloud services, content caching, and cross-border fintech. Ethio’s strategy emphasizes investments in cloud infrastructure, modular and hyperscale data centers, and cybersecurity solutions; a regional corridor broadens the reach of these assets.
Revenue Diversification. With domestic average revenue per user (ARPU) under pressure and an increasingly competitive mobile market, wholesale and regional services present Ethio Telecom with new revenue opportunities that are less vulnerable to local price caps and political fluctuations.
Alignment with National and AU Digital Agendas. Ethiopia’s digital transformation strategy and the African Union’s (AU) Digital Transformation Strategy both prioritize cross-border infrastructure, data markets, and innovation ecosystems. Horizon makes these strategies actionable by providing the physical fiber needed to support policy goals.
If Next Horizon represents Ethio Telecom’s effort to evolve from a “national champion” to a “regional platform,” then Horizon Fiber serves as one of its assessments. The successful execution of this initiative will test the company’s ability to manage cross-border projects, complex partnerships, and extensive regional customer relationships.
