Repairs for submarine cables could take five weeks - MainOne

Leading submarine cable systems supplier MainOne has disclosed that the restoration of their damaged submarine cable could need up to five weeks.

Following a network issue that occurred on Thursday, the company made this announcement in a statement on Friday.

The company’s first investigations have linked the failure to an external event that caused a cut in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Cote D’Ivoire in West Africa.

Since MainOne is a well-known internet provider for some Nigerian banks, the outage had an especially detrimental effect on them.

Customers of several significant Nigerian banks experienced discomfort as a result of the outage, since they were unable to use USSD services or access financial applications.

The company provides broadband and hybrid cloud solutions to more than only commercial and microfinance organizations. Major telecom providers, ISPs, government organizations, small and large businesses, and educational institutions are among the other clients it serves.

Customers have been informed by MainOne of its committed efforts to speed up the repair procedure and quickly bring back network connectivity.

The technology company disclosed that it had a maintenance contract for its submarine cable repair services with the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement.

After lowering the cable back to the seabed and guiding it into the ideal position, the repair process included testing and examining the cable joints for flaws.

It went on to say that it would probably take around five weeks to finish the operation, which involves deploying a ship to transport required parts from Europe to West Africa.

A portion of the statement said, “To provide repair services for the submarine cable, we have a maintenance agreement with Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement. Select and designate a vessel first. The vessel must then sail to the site of the fault in order to carry out the necessary repairs after retrieving the appropriate replacement parts.

The damaged piece of the submarine cable will next need to be dragged from the seabed onto the ship, where it will be spliced by qualified specialists, to finish the repair. After the repair, the joints will be examined and tested to make sure there are no flaws. After that, the submarine cable will be lowered back to the seabed and positioned properly.

“This process could take 1-2 weeks for repairs, and once the vessel is mobilized, it might take the ship 2-3 weeks to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa.”

The majority of submarine cable faults are caused by natural disasters like earthquakes, landslides, human activity such fishing and anchoring in shallow waters close to shore, and then equipment failure.

MainOne reported that all human activity, including ship anchors, fishing, and drilling, had been instantly ruled out due to the distance from land and the cable depth of roughly 3 km at the location of fault.

“We will gather more information when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise, but our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable,” the operator stated.