Undersea cable cuts: MainOne, others to fix damaged cables with $8m – WIOCC

West India Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), one of the companies providing Africa’s digital backbone and largely involved in the restoration of subsea cables that were damaged in the Atlantic Ocean recently, has said it will cost a total of about $2 million to achieve full restoration to a single subsea cable.

WIOCC’s CEO, Mr Chris Wood, who gave the update via a virtual press conference, explained that it will take another period of 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.

Wood said a total of about $8 million will be required to fix the affected four submarine cables that were affected by the cut.

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

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Affected Subsea cables: MainOne Cable, West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable and.

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 said: “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.”

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