MainOne, one of the undersea cable companies affected by undersea cable damages on Thursday that crippled telecoms and other critical services across several West African nations, including Nigeria, said it has restored network stability by this morning.
“MainOne worked with regional partners late last week and over the weekend to reroute traffic with restoration capacity and our observations are that we have stability on our network across the region this morning. These developments represent a significant milestone to ensure continued connectivity for the West African business community,” the undersea cable major said in a statement reviewed by Technology Times.
MainOne, owners of the undersea cable that goes by the same name, issued a force majeure at the weekend in which the company explained it did to underscore the scale of the damage and efforts being made by the company to restore services to its customers.
“MainOne worked with regional partners late last week and over the weekend to reroute traffic with restoration capacity and our observations are that we have stability on our network across the region this morning. These developments represent a significant milestone to ensure continued connectivity for the West African business community,” the undersea cable major said in a statement reviewed by Technology Times.
MainOne: We are very optimistic that our cable will be repaired as planned and services fully restored
MainOne said today “We are actively working with our maintenance partners, vessel owners and permitting authorities to expedite the repair of our submarine cable. We are very optimistic that our cable will be repaired as planned and services fully restored, so that we can continue to operate with continued integrity of the submarine cable. We want to assure the West African business community and the public that the region remains open for business.”
Following the outages the Nigerian Communications Commission said last week that, “cable companies – WACs and ACE in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime. Similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, EIG, AAE1, are said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea, resulting in degradation of services on these routes.”
The Nigerian telecoms regulator which said that internet access and speed have experienced disruptions in the networks of service providers in the affected countries, including Nigeria and other West African nations, has issued International Cable Infrastructure & Landing Station licences to Main One Cable Co. Nig Ltd, MTN Nigeria Communications Ltd, Dolphin Telecommunications Limited (formerly ETG Integrated Services Ltd) and WIOCC Nigeria Limited.
Meanwhile, MainOne, founded by Ms. Funke Opeke, one of Nigeria’s leading female tech leaders, who is also the CEO of the company now owned by Equinox, has explained the reason for what the company cited as the “quick” force majeure that was issued on Friday in the wake of the incident.
“A Force Majeure event,” MainOne said, “describes an activity beyond our reasonable control e.g. riots, earthquakes etc. Commercial contracts typically include such a clause which enables service providers to suspend contractual obligations for the duration of such disruptions. Nonetheless, we are working to provide restoration services to as many of our customers as possible, and to complete the repairs to the cable system in record time.”
According to the undersea cable major, “MainOne declared a force majeure event subsequent to testing of the cable system and when we had enough technical data from the preliminary assessment to indicate some underwater activity was the likely cause. We believe it is important to inform our customers of the fault details given the magnitude of the situation in order to set expectations and make contingency arrangements while the repairs are ongoing.”
The company explains that it was not able to swiftly switch over to redundant capacity city because “MainOne has some restoration agreements with other operators but unfortunately those cable systems are also impacted by outages at this time. We believe our submarine cable carries a significant portion of the international traffic into West Africa and provides services to multiple countries hence the magnitude of the impact.”
Under its maintenance agreement with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA), MainOne is banking on the pact to provide repair services for the affected 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,” the undersea cable company explained.
Meanwhile, WIOCC, one of the undersea cable companies operating in Nigeria, said at the weekend that it is leading Africa’s response to the cable cuts currently affecting the WACS, ACE, Main One and SAT3 subsea systems on Africa’s western seaboard.
According to Wood, “In Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fibre pair, has not been affected by the incident off Cote d‘Ivoire. WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data centre, establishing the most resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and offering the most direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa. As a result, OADC’s data centres and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are playing a key role in restoring services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent.”
Chris Wood, WIOCC Group CEO.
Chris Wood, WIOCC Group CEO said that “immediately the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d‘Ivoire our engineering, operations and field teams swung into action. They have been working tirelessly for the last 48 hours with our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers and will, within the next 24 hours, have activated an unprecedented additional 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across the unaffected cables in our network to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers. Our clients connected directly at Open Access Data Centres (OADC) data centres in South Africa and Nigeria are already protected from the impact of the subsea outages due to the unique levels of redundancy and scale of the WIOCC core backbone.”
According to Wood, “In Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fibre pair, has not been affected by the incident off Cote d‘Ivoire. WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data centre, establishing the most resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and offering the most direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa. As a result, OADC’s data centres and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are playing a key role in restoring services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent.”
WIOCC said that its “highly resilient network, with hyperscale capacity on every major system is the largest in Africa and ideally placed to swiftly deliver restoration solutions to hyperscalers, fixed and mobile carriers, internet service providers and other clients, enabling them to quickly re-establish key traffic routes into, within and out of Africa, thereby minimising performance degradation for their end-customers.”
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