Submarine cable company, MainOne says it may take up to five weeks to repair undersea cable cut which disrupted internet services in Nigeria, Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Senegal, and other West African and East African countries since Thursday.
The company said the cause of the network outage was as a result to a fault on the MainOne network.
“Preliminary findings and further investigations revealed that the fault occurred due to an external incident that resulted in a cut on our submarine cable system, in the Atlantic Ocean offshore Cote D’Ivoire, along the coast of West Africa,” the firm stated.
Since Thursday, telecommunications subscribers and bank users have been stranded as the disruption paralysed digital transactions and internet communications. Mobile network operators like MTN and some banks have attributed the network outage on a subsea cable cut in the Atlantic Ocean.
On how long the outage would last, MainOne said, “We have a maintenance agreement with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) to provide repair services for the submarine cable.
“First identify and assign a vessel, the vessel has to retrieve the necessary spares required for repair, and then sail to the fault location to conduct the repair work. Next, in order to complete the repair, the affected section of the submarine cable will have to be pulled from the seabed onto the ship where it will be spliced by skilled technicians.
“Post repair, joints will be inspected and tested for any defects and then the submarine cable is lowered back to the seabed and guided to a good position. This process might take 1-2 weeks for repairs while about 2-3 weeks of transit time may be required for the vessel to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa once the vessel is mobilised.”
On the possible cause of the outage in the sea, the company said, “Most submarine cable faults occur as a result of human activities such as fishing and anchoring in shallow waters near shore, natural hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, and then equipment failure.
“Given the distance from land, and the cable depth of about 3 kms at the point of fault, any kind of human activity – ship anchors, fishing, drilling etc has been immediately ruled out. Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable, but we will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.”
In an update, the company said actions have been taken to mobilise a vessel to expeditiously repair the cable in the deep ocean.
MainOne said restoration capacity for temporary relief would be made available for customers. “While we do have some pre-configured restoration capacity on other cable systems, unfortunately, those cable systems are also down currently. We have since acquired capacity on available cable systems, but we have not found readily available capacity to fully restore services to all our customers.”
