Submarine cable repairs in advance stage as 100 links restored

. New cable to cost $ 1 billion to build

EFFORTS to restore Internet services fully to pre- March 14 outages in Nigeria and 12 other affected countries have been increased as about two and a half terabytes of capacity have been restored; over 100 links are now functional while 35 networks are now up and running.

The Chief Executive Officer of West Indian Ocean Cable Company ( WIOCC), Chris

Wood, disclosed this during a virtual meeting with journalists on efforts deployed thus far to restore services.

Recall that on March 14, undersea cables, including the West Africa Cable System ( WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe ( ACE), Mainone and SAT3, had outages, which negatively impacted data and fixed telecoms services in several West African countries, notably Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal and Cote d’ivoire, as well eastern and southern Africa.

Wood said: “I think in the last four or five days, we have brought up over two and a half terabytes of capacity. We’ve restored over 100 links now. And we brought more people into our data center in Lagos through the Open Access Data Centres ( OADC) which has connectivity directly into the Equiano system, which at the moment is the only major system still in operation serving most of West Africa.”

Wood added that 35 networks across West African countries, Nigeria inclusive, have been restored to full capacity resilience, adding that it will take another four weeks to fully restore Internet services to all network operators that are connected to the affected four submarine cables that came from Europe, with landing points along the West African coast.

According to him, there is also a need for more cables to be landed in the country to provide redundancy, although it is a cost- intensive project. He disclosed that landing a cable from Europe to Africa will cost about $ 1 billion.

He said the company is also making bigger investments in new systems and has just deployed over $ 100 million of capital in accessing new subsea systems. He disclosed that the company will be landing the 2Africa cable in Nigeria later this year at two points, one in Lagos and another in Qua Iboe.