Telecom submarine cable restored after days of clog in internet traffic

One of Nigeria’s telecom underwater cable system, MaineOne submarine cable, which suffered a recent outage and caused a compulsory re- route of internet traffic, has finally been fixed and restored to working condition after almost two weeks of halt in operations.

The cable, which landed from Portugal in July 2010, drove down the cost of international bandwidth, increased internet penetration at reduced cost with a higher connectivity speed.

Yesterday, MainOne announced the completion of repair works on the cable damaged since June 18, 2017, after a final testing to ensure it was in good operating condition was conducted on Sunday, July 2, 2017.

In a statement made available to BusinessDay, Funke Opeke, CEO, MainOne, expressed the company’s appreciation to its customers and partners for the patience and support during the recent outage incident on the submarine cable.

Describing the outage as a Force Majeure, due to movement in the seabed, Opeke highlighted the company’s efforts to resolve the outage to its customers.

“The submarine cable fault was in a known area of ridges in the seabed, at a location 3,400 meters water depth in the international waters outside Senegal. After we discovered the outage and isolated the fault to a location 3000km South of Portugal, our operational processes and disaster recovery plans worked as expected and we deployed a repair vessel from our membership in the Atlantic Cable and Maintenance Agreement which left France by 8am on Monday June 19th 2017.

“The vessel travelled to Portland, United Kingdom, where it picked up critical spares and then journeyed to the repair location which was further isolated to within a 2-kilometre range while the vessel was in transit.

“We have concluded a full repair of the submarine cable with a final splice yesterday, Sunday, July 2, 2017. The cable has been tested to be in good operating condition and we have since restored all our customer’s services to normal operating conditions,” she said.

According to Opeke, “During this period, we had some restoration capacity and rerouted internet traffic on our network via alternative routes to minimise the impact of the outage to our customers.

“However, we were unable to provide enough capacity and interconnection to fully restore our entire network. We realise many of our customers have become solely reliant on MainOne for Internet services and we will continue to secure more restoration capacity in case of any such eventualities in the future.”

Jumoke Akiyode