WIOCC Gives Update on Undersea Cable Cuts, Full Resilience Network Restoration

The Chief Executive Officer of West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), Mr. Chris Wood has shared clearer insights into the state of repairs for undersea cable cuts, which affected Nigeria and 12 African countries.

Recall, Business Remarks reported that most African countries have suffered internet outages following several submarine cable cuts.

According to Wood, out of the eight subsea cables bring internet capacity to Nigeria, the affected cables include: MainOne Cable, West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable and SAT3 subsea cable systems. All four subsea cables came from Europe, and they all have landing points at the coast of West African countries, including Nigeria.

Speaking about the repairs with journalists in Nigeria, Wood said WIOCC has been able to bring up over two and a half terabytes of capacity and restored over 100 links and have brought more people into its OADC data center in Lagos, which has connectivity directly to the Equiano system.

He noted that, WIOCC has restored about 40 networks in 10 days across West African countries, Nigeria inclusive, have been brought to full capacity resilience. He also said, fully resilience networks in other affected African countries should be in four weeks.

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

Speaking on the cost of repairs, although the cost will runs in several million of dollars, Wood assured subscribers the owners of the affected cables would bear the cost of restoration of the individual subsea cables.

According to him, it will cost a total of about $2 million to achieve full restoration to a single subsea cable, depending on the extent of the cut on the cable.

Wood explained that earlier cable cuts in the Red Sea affected restoration efforts on the continent. “So, three cables were cut in the Red Sea, which also serves Africa. If the Red Sea cable cuts hadn’t been done, more traffic could have been restored going south from Nigeria around South Africa and back up the Red Sea. This incident was compounded by the Red Sea cuts, with three cables affected too,” he stated

He stated most internet traffic has now been redirected to Google’s Equanio cable. Explaining why Google’s cable was unaffected, WIOCC CEO said: “Equiano hasn’t been hit is it is laid much further offshore and at the moment only lands in Nigeria and Togo, and then it goes straight out offshore for several 100 kilometres.”

“The effective networks have now migrated to the Equiano cable, and the timeline to get back to a fully resilient network is probably about four weeks from now,” he continued.

Wood said three repair ships have been mobilized.

“One of them Is coming from South Africa and the other is in Cape Verde. The third is in the UK and they are now starting to head towards the affected area and they will then locate the cable cuts and repair them.

“The length of the process depends on the weather as well, if the weather is bad they won’t be able to work, so it could take a little longer. But I think everything should be done in three to four weeks, maybe slightly earlier if everything goes to plan,” Wood added.

Furthermore, he stated that WIOCC has just deployed over $100 million of capital in accessing new subsea systems and the Equiano system and a new one that’s about to go live later this year called 2Africa.

He stressed that when 2Africa comes in service, it will increase the resilience of everybody’s networks that uses it adding that bringing two cable landings into Nigeria, one in Akwa Ibom and one in Lagos will further strengthen Nigeria’s position and provide extra redundancy as well.

The eight subsea cables bring Internet capacity to Nigeria: Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), Glo-1, SAT3, West Africa Cable System (WACS), MainOne, Equiano, 2Africa, and Nigeria Camerron Submarine Cable System (NCSCS).