On 19 August 2026, Cullen International published an updated benchmark of how 17 jurisdictions regulate international submarine cables. Four of them are African: Egypt, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. The public summary gives no country-level findings for Egypt, Nigeria or South Africa, so this analysis does not guess at them. It does say one concrete thing about the continent: Kenya is restructuring its cable licensing regime. That makes Kenya the useful case study, because its regulator has put its reasoning in writing.
What the benchmark found
The headline numbers describe a regulatory world that is thickening. Only five of the 17 jurisdictions require a dedicated telecoms licence to land a cable and run a landing station. Most use a general authorisation regime but still require several separate permits, and Cullen reports that collecting every approval can take up to two years. Twelve jurisdictions now give cables stronger protection than ordinary telecoms assets, through mandatory security assessments and ownership screening. Eleven impose cable-specific outage reporting, and six have designated cable protection zones. Only five offer funding or tax incentives to attract cable investment, and only three support sovereign repair vessels.
Those figures are a year-on-year drift in one direction. Cullen's September 2025 edition covered 16 jurisdictions and counted four licence-requiring regimes, 11 with enhanced security and 10 with outage reporting. The 2026 edition adds Türkiye, so some of the movement comes from a larger sample. Even so, every rule category except the number of protection zones moved toward more obligation, while incentives did not move.
The strongest case for tougher rules
The case for stricter oversight is serious and should be stated fairly. Cables carry almost all intercontinental internet traffic, and a single failure can cut off whole countries. In September 2025, cuts to the SMW4 and IMEWE systems near Jeddah degraded connectivity in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UAE and India, and Microsoft warned Azure customers of higher latency. Africa is exposed to the same Red Sea chokepoint. A regulator that wants to know who owns a landing station, how quickly outages are reported and whether repair capacity exists is asking reasonable questions. Outage reporting in particular costs operators little and gives governments data they currently lack.
Where Kenya's approach points the right way
Kenya's proposal is instructive because it moves toward simplicity. In its December 2024 consultation on the telecommunications market structure, the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA) noted that Submarine Cable Landing Rights (SCLR), Satellite Landing Rights and International Gateway licences each carried different fees and technology limits. The CA called those differences inconsistent with the technology-neutrality principle of its Unified Licensing Framework. Its proposal was to merge the satellite and submarine landing categories into a single Landing Rights Licence. That licence would also let investors use Kenya's location for terrestrial cables transiting to neighbouring countries and for satellite hubs serving clients outside Kenya.
The fee comparison shows what is at stake. The SCLR currently carries an initial licence fee of KSh 15 million and a minimum annual fee of KSh 4 million. The proposed Landing Rights Licence keeps those figures at 15 million and 4 million (or 0.4% of gross turnover if higher) but extends them to satellite entrants, whose one-off fee was previously US$12,500 with no annual charge. Whether that is wise is contested. The fee burden on satellite operators rises sharply, which could discourage the very investment the CA says it wants. Cable-landing economics and satellite economics really are different, and a single price may fit neither.
The broader lesson is that Kenya is rationalising categories and defining holders' commercial obligations in one document, rather than layering new approvals onto old ones. I found no evidence that the proposal had taken effect as of this writing, and the CA's own roadmap targeted implementation in FY2025/2026. Because the benchmark says only that Kenya is restructuring, the final shape of the regime remains open.
The risk of copying Europe's playbook
The benchmark's own examples show the other path. The EU published a Cable Security Toolbox and, on 11 February 2026, committed about €347 million through the Connecting Europe Facility. The money covers repair equipment, monitoring tools and priority projects. That is a regulator pairing obligations with funding, and the funding is the part African governments are least able to copy. Few African regulators can fund sovereign repair vessels or monitoring networks. If they import the security-screening half of the toolbox without the money, operators get another approval gate and no additional resilience.
That asymmetry matters because the evidence suggests delay itself is a resilience problem. A route that takes two years to permit is a route that is not available when the next cable fails. Redundancy comes from more landings, more cables and more operators, and every extra authorisation step slows all three.
What proportionate policy looks like
Three principles follow from the data. First, keep authorisation to one window with published timelines. Brazil's consultation on licensing timeframes, noted in the benchmark, is the right instinct. Second, make security review narrow and proportionate: screen ownership and require outage reporting, which are cheap, rather than open-ended discretionary conditions. Third, if governments want resilience, they should pay for the public-good parts, such as shared repair capacity, instead of passing the cost to landing-station operators through fees.
Kenya has a chance to show that a licensing overhaul can lower friction while raising capacity. Its draft is not perfect, and the fee design deserves the criticism it received. But the direction, fewer categories, clear holder obligations and technology neutrality, is the one the benchmark's two-year approval figure argues for. The test for Kenya, and for the other African markets Cullen tracks, is whether the final rules shorten the path to a cable landing or lengthen it.