Adedapo Adesanya
By Adedapo Adesanya
The total expenses that will be used on the restoration of subsea cables that were recently damaged and caused outages in Nigeria, as well as other countries, will total around $8 million.
This is according to the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), the parent company of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), one of the companies with the largest capacity affected by the damages.
WIOCC’s CEO, Mr Chris Wood, while giving the update via a virtual conference on Monday said 35 networks across West African countries, Nigeria inclusive, have been restored to full capacity resilience.
He added 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, it will cost about $2 million to achieve full restoration to a single subsea cable, depending on the extent of the cut on the cable.
This brings it to a total of about $8 million to fix the four submarine cables that were affected by the cut.
Mr Wood, however, said the owners of the affected cables would bear the cost of restoration of the individual subsea cables.
The affected undersea 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.
Mr Wood who ruled out the possibility of sabotage or any other factor that has been speculated to be the cause of the multiple cuts on the affected four submarine cables, said from the ongoing restoration exercise.
He said that the cables were affected by heavy landslides from the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, where debris from landslides effect may have rolled down into the ocean to cause the damages.
He also said ships have been deployed to the affected areas to carry out repairs on the affected cables, and that until the ships arrive in a few days to effect repairs and investigate the real cause of the submarine cable cuts, it would be difficult to ascertain the real cause of the multiple cuts on the affected submarine cables.
“Since the subsea cable cut, we have restored internet services to 35 networks across West Africa, amounting to 2.5 Terabytes capacity with over 100 links. We recently deployed equipment worth $100 million in accessing new cuts on undersea cables.
“We used our capacity on the Equiano cable that was not affected by the cut to restore services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent,” he said.
