The growth in the Nigerian internet data market suffered a temporary setback, due to a submarine cable cut on one of the landing cables of the SAT3 submarine cable system. Suburban West Africa, the premier supplier of internet backbone services in the region had been on the forefront of increasing the internet capacity available in Nigeria through a partnership agreement with Benin Telecom, a member of the SAT3 submarine cable consortium. This partnership resulted in Suburban deploying a redundant terrestrial fiber optic network into the Republic of Benin, in order to connect into the cable system there.  However, this current outage was experienced on the landing cable that connects the terrestrial fiber optic networks to the submarine fiber optic cable.

According to the Chief Technical Officer of Suburban West Africa, Mr. Anil Verma, “This is only a temporary setback.  Once the cable is restored, we will continue with our efforts of making available more internet bandwidth in Nigeria at a reasonable cost, as we have been doing over the last few years.  It is unfortunate that the SAT3 submarine cable is currently the only active cable system available to West Africa.  While we have built redundancy on the terrestrial leg of our fiber 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 SAT3 service has been available, this is the first time there has been an outage on the Benin landing cable. There have been outages on the actual SAT3 submarine cable itself, but not the Benin landing cable. The SAT3 cable is built with redundancy, which is why there has been minimal downtime in other outages, but with this outage being on an isolated landing cable, we will have to wait for the SAT3 consortium to send one of their cable maintenance ships to Benin to fix the problem. This is expected to take approximately 10 days.”

Mr. Bruce Ayonote, the Chief Executive Officer of Suburban West Africa also commented that as a service provider, the company looks forward to the day when they are able to leverage as many different infrastructure options, in order to provide quality and high-availability services to their customers.  Mr. Ayonote pointed out that the company is looking forward to the successful completion of some of the other submarine cable projects in the region, such as the Glo1 and MainOne projects.  According to Mr. Ayonote “providing connectivity solutions is all about redundancy at multiple levels.  Once there are more submarine cables available, there will be more landing stations. With the distribution networks we have already deployed into different markets, we will be able to offer higher availability services to our customers with less disruption of services.”