Nigerians and many across West Africa brace for potentially sluggish internet as MainOne, a leading provider of submarine cable systems, revealed repairs on their damaged cable could take up to five weeks.
According to a statement issued by the company, its preliminary investigations suggested that some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable. It, however, said more data would be obtained when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.
MainOne said it had to declare a force majeure event after it tested the cable system and when it had enough technical data from the preliminary assessment to indicate some underwater activity was the likely cause.
“We believe it is important to inform our customers of the fault details given the magnitude of the situation in order to set expectations and make contingency arrangements while the repairs are ongoing,” the company stated.
Nonetheless, MainOne said it is working to provide restoration services to as many of its customers as possible, and to complete the repairs to the cable system in record time.
The cable company said it has a maintenance agreement with the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement (ACMA) to provide repair services for the submarine cable.
Providing background to the service disruption that has led to poor data service for millions of internet users in the country, the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) explained that the disruption was caused by a combination of cable cuts, resulting in equipment faults on the major undersea cables along the West African Coast.
“The cuts occurred somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal. “Cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe have experienced faults while SAT3 and MainOne have downtime,” it stated
