Having announced yesterday at the opening of their new offices in Johannesburg that the number African Facebook users has increased to 170 million, the company has announced further plans to expand by adding wifi hotspots and laying fiber-optic cables in a bid to spread its reach outside of developed markets according to reports in Bloomberg.
The plans form part of Facebook’s long-term investment push in Africa, the social network’s least developed market with less than 10 percent of its 1.86 billion users worldwide.
Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing, said in an interview in Johannesburg on Tuesday that the rise in users has seen a 42% increase on the number of users since the social networking giant opened their first office in Africa in 2015.
International wireless carriers Emirates Telecommunications, Etisalat, and Surf will be coming together in partnership in order to roll out wifi in Nigeria and Kenya.
This comes after Facebook announced the construction of 770 kilometres of fiber-optic cables in Uganda alongside Bharti Airtel of India earlier this year according to MoneyWeb.
Source - IT News Africa