Last week, the West African coastline suffered major undersea cable cuts. These cuts affected operators such as Seacom and Liquid Intelligent Technologies. MainOne, a submarine cable company, says repairing damaged cables could take up to five weeks.
A statement from internet infrastructure firm Cloudflare said, “The assignment of repair ships depends on a number of factors, including ownership of the impacted cables.”
Orange Marine confirmed their participation in the repair of the damaged subsea cables, alongside other specialist companies working to restore internet connectivity.
Orange Marine’s ship, the Léon Thévenin, has set sail from South Africa carrying fiber optic cable. Its destination: the site of four undersea cable breaks that caused recent internet outages and slowdowns across several African countries.
Liquid Intelligence Technologies, Ben Roberts, stated that each expedition by the vessel comes at a cost of between USD 1 million to USD 2 million. This cost is met by the submarine cable companies.
The Thévenin is equipped to perform repairs in waters ranging from shallow depths of 10 meters to a staggering 7 kilometers. According to Marine Traffic, a vessel tracking website, the ship departed Tuesday evening and is expected to arrive in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire on Friday, March 29th.
SEACOM/Liquid Redundancy
While repair efforts are ongoing, operators have implemented redundancy plans to mitigate disruption of services.
After multiple breaks in the West Africa Cable System (WACS) caused disruptions to fibre and mobile internet in South Africa, Seacom rerouted its WACS customers to the Equiano cable.
“Our clients are fortunate to have built-in redundancy. Their IP traffic is automatically rerouted, meaning the break is mostly transparent to the end-user barring a potential slight increase in latency,” Prenesh Padayachee, Seacom Group Chief Digital Officer said in a press interview.
For enhanced reliability, the company utilizes redundant layers, across both the subsea network and national terrestrial networks.
A Liquid Technologies spokesperson said, “Our investment in multiple undersea cables along the East and West coasts has allowed us to carry traffic with minimal disruption.”
Similar to Seacom, Liquid also has a terrestrial network that has helped reduce the impact of the submarine cable cuts.
Liquid Dataport fibre terrestrial network is crucial in keeping the data flowing across the continent. The company has over 100,000 kilometres of fibre optic cables spanning the continent. In 2023, the company launched a fully redundant terrestrial fibre link of 1000 km between Kenya and Ethiopia.
To sum up the devastation of the cuts, Padayachee said this is one of the worst disruptions he has seen. Liquid’s Ben Roberts wrote, “Situation is Very bad”.
Going forward, Roberts believes West African countries will have to improve interconnectivity with their neighbours and big hubs in Africa. This will help reduce the impact of cable cuts in future.
