Suburban West Africa limited has informed its customers that it has regained connectivity to international optic fibre network (SAT3) that connects West Africa to the rest of the world. The service was recovered at exactly 00:32 hrs on the 19th August 2009 when their Network Operating Centre reported live traffic to their upstream counterparts. The company also informed its customers that it would carry out integrity and stability tests in compliance with international best practise before reactivating their services.

It will be recalled that Suburban reported a disruption of their services to their customers a few weeks ago that affected about 70 percent of internet traffic into Nigeria. The fault was traced to a submarine cut at Cotonou in Benin Republic where Suburban accesses the International fibre cable. Efforts then commenced to mobilise a repair ship and crew to rectify the fault. The cable maintenance team had to divert one of their repair ships that were involved in another project to attend to this fault.

According to Suleiman Arzika, Chief Operating Officer of Suburban, the repair ship arrived Cotonou late Saturday evening and commenced repairs on Sunday morning. The fault was discovered 25 kilometres off the coast at a depth of 55m and was successfully restored yesterday. He assured that with this restoration, their customers will have more than enough bandwidth to meet demand and Internet and all other international services will normalise in a few days.
He added that Suburban has taken steps to ensure that the effect of this type of occurrence will be minimised on their customers to avoid disruption in future.