WIOCC, the parent company of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), said 35 networks across West African countries, Nigeria inclusive, have been restored to full capacity resilience.

Mr. Chris Wood, WIOCC’s CEO, who gave the update via a virtual press conference, explained 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.

WIOCC ’s 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.

According to Wood, it will cost a total of 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 affected four submarine cables that were affected by the cut.

Wood however said the owners of the affected cables would bear the cost of restoration of the individual subsea cables.

Affected Subsea cables:

1. MainOne Cable,
2. West African Cable System (WACS),
3. African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable and
4. 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.

Wood who ruled out the possibility of sabotage or any other factor that have been speculated to be the cause of the multiple cuts on the affected four submarine cables, said from the ongoing restoration exercise, he suspected that the cables were affected by heavy landslides from the coast of Cote d I’ voire, where debris from landslides effect may have rolled down into the ocean to cause the damages.

He however said ships have been deployed to the affected areas to carry out repairs on the affected cables, and that until the ships arrive in few days time 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. What we did was to use 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.”

• Recall that the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), had called for a coordinated and multilateral approach by the region to protect shared telecommunications infrastructure, and diversify connectivity to ensure uninterruptible connections.

Dr. Aminu Maida, the executive vice chairman of the  Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), made the submission in a statement delivered at the 21st West Africa Telecommunications Regulatory Assembly (WATRA) Annual General Meeting (AGM), which held in Freetown, Sierra Leone, from the 19th to 22nd March 2024.

Dr. Maida, whose message was delivered at the WATRA AGM by the Deputy Director, Public Affairs of the Commission, Nnenna Ukoha, stated that the recent submarine cable cuts that resulted in nationwide outages on multiple networks in 12 African countries has raised the urgent need for the sub-region to establish a mechanism to protect itself from damage to submarine infrastructure and its attendant impact on the sub-region.

In his reaction, Wood said subsea cables all over the world could get cut for various reasons, which could be as a result of landslides, propeller from ships, among other reasons.

“What Nigeria and other West African countries need are more cables landing at the shores of the country that will lead to huge redundancy. The idea of physical security may not work because the cables are laid on the bed of the sea and no one can see exactly their locations to warrant physical protection. So having more cables is the best security measure and not physical security,” Wood said.

Although Wood said it would cost about $1 billion to berth a subsea cable from Europe to West Africa, he however insisted that multiple cable system remained the best form to address cable cuts that occur all over the world.

The WIOCC CEO further said the company’s policy of strategic deployment of converged, open-access digital infrastructure at a hyperscale level and delivery of unrivalled resiliency, enables it to meet and anticipate the needs of Africa’s wholesale community with sufficient scale and network diversity to address even the most challenging situations.

He said WIOOC was established 15 years ago to provide backbone services to organisations and their networks across West Africa.

WIOCC’s 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.

According to Chris Wood, group CEO of WIOCC, “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. 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.”

“Our priority is to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for our clients,” added Ryan Sher, Group Chief Operating Officer at WIOCC. “We have invested heavily in deploying diverse, highly scalable national and international connectivity to support the uptime requirements of our wholesale client base. Investing at scale means that we consistently carry extra capacity, ensuring we are able to rapidly turn up or re-route capacity to address unexpected network disruptions. It also enables us to deploy short-term restoration solutions for other operators on a case-by-case basis. Any service provider affected by these outages, whether an existing WIOCC client or not, is encouraged to contact us to explore options.”

He said that WIOCC’s policy of strategic deployment of converged, open-access digital infrastructure at a hyperscale level and delivery of unrivalled resiliency, enables it to meet and anticipate the needs of Africa’s wholesale community with sufficient scale and network diversity to address even the most challenging situations.