The damage done to the satellite cable that provides internet service to Nigeria and other countries in West Africa SAT-3 has been rectified and service restored.
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in a report yesterday disclosed that the repair of the damage which was discovered 25 kilometres off the coast of Benin on a branch of the SAT-3 cable, which connects Europe to South Africa led to a restoration of service to West Africa.
The SAT-3 consortium, according to the report, diverted a ship from Cape Town in South Africa to repair the fault. It arrived in Cotonou in Benin late Saturday evening and carried out repairs on Sunday morning. However a source, Suburban, which runs the network confirmed to the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) that the cable was still undergoing testing with a view to carrying full traffic by late last night or this morning.
While it lasted, the damage which severely disrupted and knocked out service in Togo, Niger and Benin, left more than 70 percent of Nigeria without internet access causing severe problems for its banking sector, government and mobile phone networks.
Many countries had to either reroute traffic overland or use expensive satellite links to maintain connectivity. Nigeria was particularly badly hit because around 70 percent of its bandwidth is routed through neighbouring Benin.The network, run by Suburban Telecom, was set up to bypass Nigeria’s principal telecoms operator, Nitel, which runs the SAT-3 branch cable which lands in Nigeria.
It will be recalled that the Chief Technical Officer (CTO), of Suburban West Africa, Mr. Anil Verma, had, in a statement made available to THISDAY when the outage occurred, disclosed that the damage was a ‘’temporary setback that would last ten days.
He lamented that it was unfortunate that the SAT-3 submarine cable is currently the only active cable system available to West Africa .‘’While we have built redundancy on the terrestrial leg of our fibre optic network that delivers services to customers, there is vulnerability on the landing cable deployed into each country.
“Our network is currently routed into Nigeria through the Benin Republic , which is the landing station we are connected to. In the eight years the SAT-3 service has been available, this is the first time there has been an outage on the Benin landing cable,” he said.
Aug192009