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　　Though for many of us the year ahead may look pretty depressing, 2016 promises one great breakthrough — a major step toward ending Africa’s particular and backward form of the great Digital Divide.

　　Poor connectivity has bedeviled much of the continent’s internet access but now a huge improvement is coming. It’s a new sub-sea cable, to be laid off Africa’s eastern coastline,  enabling a reliable and affordable international connectivity service to both coastal and landlocked countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Africa.

　　The project is being developed by Liquid Sea, an offshore branch of Liquid Telecom, which already runs a pan-African network based on land cable supported by satellite links for rural and remote areas. Altogether, with offices from South Africa and Botswana in the south to Kenya in the East, taking in Democratic Republic of Congo in the center, it makes up the continent’s largest single connecting network crossing multiple national borders.

　　Africa has benefited in many ways from the digital revolution, but internet coverage still differs from place to place.[

　　And the unpleasant truth is that, despite some great advance in African development over the last decade and more, its effects are unequal and taken as a whole, less than 16 percent of Africans have access to the Internet, which compares that with 63 percent of Europeans and 79 percent of North Americans.

　　It’s obvious what a disadvantage is placed upon Africans by such digital inequality. The economics of the entire process is skewed（歪的）by poor network performance in Africa, with the total bandwidth available to shuttle data back and forth between African countries and the rest of the world amounting to less than 1 terabit per second. That’s about one-seventieth of Europe’s international bandwidth capacity（容量）.

　　Now Liquid Sea’s underwater cable stretching from eastern South Africa to the Middle East,  with onward connections to Europe, aims to contribute much more in building Africa’s better connected digital future.