Melvin Onwubuke
The Association of Licensed Telecommunications Operators of Nigeria has said voice and data services affected by the cut in the undersea fibre optics along the coasts of Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal will be completely restored on Tuesday (today).
This was disclosed by the chairman of ALTON, Gbenga Adebayo on Monday, according to The Punch.
On March 14, 2024 March 14, 2024, Nigeria and several other West African countries experienced a telecoms service outage due to undersea cable cuts, disrupting communication services across the region.
The cable companies affected include the West African Cable System and African Coast to Europe on the West Coast route from Europe, both of which have experienced faults. Additionally, SAT3 and MainOne have reported downtime due to the cable cut.
Over the weekend, the telcos, banks, and other financial institutions switched their traffic to alternative service providers in a decisive move to lessen the impact of the disruption. While some providers had confirmed the gradual restoration of services, others were still in the process of migration, leading to ongoing delays and congestion.
Nigerian Communications Commission on Monday announced in statement signed by the Director of Public Affairs, Reuben Muoka, announced that services had been restored to approximately 90 per cent of their peak utilisation capacities.
The statement read in part, “Following the disruption on March 14, 2024, which affected data and voice services due to cuts in undersea fibre optics along the coasts of Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, we are pleased to announce that services have now been restored to approximately 90 per cent of their peak utilization capacities.
““All operators who were impacted by the cuts have taken recovery capacity from submarine cables that were not impacted by the cuts and have thus recovered approximately 90 per cent of their peak utilisation capacities.
“Mobile Network Operators have assured the Commission that data and voice services would operate optimally pending full repairs of the undersea cables as they have managed to activate alternative connectivity to bring the situation back to normalcy.
“We extend our appreciation to telecom consumers for their patience and understanding during the downtime caused by the undersea fibre cuts.”
According to Adebayo, service would be fully restored on Tuesday.
He said, “From the progress we have seen, services will be restored completely tomorrow (Tuesday). We are almost there. There are many submarine cables routed to Nigeria. Some are routed through the Ivory Coast and Senegal. Others are routed in other directions. So, that incident was an incident affecting that particular route.
“The other operators not following that route were not affected. So, they improvised an alternate route. It could have also been the other way, with other people routing their traffic the other way. It’s a common thing in network planning.”
Adebayo noted that none of the Telcos operating in Nigeria was exempted from the disruption, however, the degree of the impact varied.
The chairman stated, “Every telco was affected by the cable cut because it was a major link to Nigeria. The degree of the impact may differ for network providers. All communications in West Africa were affected. There was no exemption. It’s not just Nigeria.”
