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Africa’s build-out of telecom transmission networks has stepped up another gear. In the 12 months to June 2010, Africa’s fixed line and alternative operators brought a further 57,560-km of terrestrial fibre and microwave transmission network into service. Laid end-to-end, that is enough new operational network to wrap around the earth 1.5 times.

The second edition of the Africa Telecom Transmission Map now available from Hamilton Research has been comprehensively updated to show Africa's terrestrial and submarine cable transmission networks as at June 2010. The map contains data for 113 telecom operators in 52 African countries.

These transmission networks underpin the delivery of broadband data and Internet services. Africa’s total inventory of terrestrial transmission network increased by 26% in the last year to reach 585,471-kms at the end of June 2010 (465,659-km in 2009, restated to include an additional 64,377-km of network not previously included).

A new feature provided with the second edition of the map is the Rolling Transmission Map, a web version of the poster map which allows you to zoom in to read the map in more detail and is updated on a quarterly basis.

The Rolling Transmission Map is provided on a complimentary basis to customers for the poster map, on a single-user, 12-month subscription basis. Articles tracking Africa’s transmission network roll out are streamed through the map, and choose from selectable population density, landscape or earth lights background mapping.

This build-out of terrestrial network infrastructure is bringing more and more people within the reach of high capacity fibre networks, as national backbone networks are completed.

The 2010 Africa Transmission Map shows over 3,000 fibre nodes. In June 2010, 176 million people were within a 10-km reach of an operational fibre node, 356 million within a 25-km reach, and 526 million within a 50-km reach.

Need more data? In addition to the poster map, we also publish ten transmission datasets developed from the data underlying the map. These are available in two versions, the Silver and Gold subscriptions, each of which shows more detail on the online map.

The Silver transmission map, which shows labels for all fibre nodes (>3,000 labels), and the first six datasets listed below. The Gold Transmission Map, which also shows operator labels for each piece of network infrastructure (>5,000 labels), includes all ten datasets shown below.