NCC Restores 90% Services of Undersea Cable Cuts
Emmanuel Onuh. Abuja
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) say voice and data services affected by undersea cable cuts have been restored.
This is contained in a statement signed by the Director of Public Affairs of the Commission Reuben Muoka on Monday.
Confirming the incident, that occured last Thursday that affected banks, Telecommunications, and even media organizations the NCC said the damage affected major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire and is causing downtime across West and South African
The statement further reads the cuts occurred somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal, with an attendant disruption in Portugal.
It said that cable companies – West African Cable System (WACS) and African Coast to Europe (ACE) in the West Coast route from Europe – had experienced faults, while SAT3 and Main One had downtime.
NCC added that similar undersea cables providing traffic from Europe to the East Coast of Africa, like Seacom, Europe India Gateway (EIG), and Asia-Africa-Europe 1 (AAE1), were said to have been cut at some point around the Red Sea.
This, it said, resulted in the degradation of services across these routes.
Mr Muoka said “We are pleased to announce that services have now been restored to approximately 90 per cent of their peak utilization capacities,”
He explained that all operators who were impacted by the cuts have taken recovery capacity from submarine cables which were not impacted by the cuts.
He added that mobile network operators have assured the commission that data and voice services would operate optimally pending full repairs of the undersea cables as they have managed to activate alternative connectivities to bring back the situation to normalcy.
“We extend our appreciation to telecom consumers for their patience and understanding during the downtime caused by the undersea fibre cuts,” he added.
Recall that last Thursday, Nigerians including telecommunications companies, banks, and media among others were hit by an internet outage as a result of damage to international undersea cables supplying them with connectivity.
