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The undersea cable company, which extends internet services to West and Central Africa, estimates it could take five weeks to repair damage to its equipment discovered last week.
On March 14, widespread internet outages were reported in Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, and Ivory Coast, leaving many websites unavailable and disrupting online banking operations. Since then, some of the problems have been alleviated, but internet access remains unstable as it takes several weeks to resolve the cause.
The Ghana National Communications Authority said the five-week estimate was for “full service restoration after vessels were dispatched to various locations.” The regulator said it had met with four major cable landing service providers: African Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, South Atlantic 3 and West African Cable System (WACS).
MainOne, which is based in Nigeria and also operates cable services in Ghana and Ivory Coast, said its network was disrupted on Monday (March 18) after rerouting weekend traffic to other unaffected cables. It was announced that “stability” had been restored. He described this event as follows:external events As a result, cuts occurred along cable lines off the West African coast. The exact nature of the incident has not yet been confirmed in detail.
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Cables run deep in the ocean power a world of wireless internet, transmitting data across continents through connected landing stations and data centers. In recent years, Google and Meta have become the largest fiber optic cable installation operations in Africa as part of their investment and product expansion efforts in the continent.
Cable Glo-1, provided by Nigerian telecommunications company Globacom, was not affected by last week’s incident. 2Africa, a 45,000km cable being rolled out by a Meta-led consortium that landed in Nigeria and Ghana last month, was also not named as one of those affected. Access to his WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook apps owned by Mehta remained normal in both Nigeria and Nigeria. ghana.
Google services such as the search engine and YouTube will also work as usual. The company’s $1 billion Equiano cable is being installed in Nigeria, Togo and Namibia. Cable company Seacom, which focuses on East and Southern Africa, said: rerouted traffic To Equiano after the interruption.
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Faults along submarine cable lines serving Africa are not new. WACS cable reported two disconnections in the first half of 2020, and in 2018 he had a complete internet outage for two days in Mauritania due to an ACE line disconnection. ACE was Mauritania’s only submarine cable connection, but plans for a second connection have since begun. The European Investment Bank is providing the bulk of his 35 million euros of funding for the new cable.
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Bright Simmons, a researcher at Ghana’s IMANI Center for Policy Education, said the ongoing events show that Africa’s digital economy is “extremely fragile” and that undersea cable capacity and policy makers are He said it raises questions about the efficiency of the crisis response plan.
“Even though the number of cables has increased significantly since the early 2000s when there was only one cable, Africa still has just over 5% of the world’s undersea cables,” Simmons told Semafor Africa. If multiple failures occur, it will be difficult to reroute traffic to less-loaded facilities, he said.
However, the relative speed of recovery between countries is… Faster in Sierra Leone With only one cable landing company compared to five in Ghana, policymakers and the private sector are looking to ensure the country’s connectivity infrastructure has “clear design principles centered around continuity and disaster recovery.” Simmons said the government should take the initiative to treat it as an “integrated system with He said this is a lesson that Africa needs interoperable data centers to make its digital economy more resilient.
