WIOCC mobilises ships to fix damaged submarine cable

Wood
March 29, 2024

One of the companies leading the restoration of internet services disrupted as a result of four submarine cable cuts, West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC), said three ships have been deployed to identify and fix the points at which the cables were cut.

Its CEO, Chris Wood, in a virtual interaction, said the ships would come from South Africa, Cape Verde and the United Kingdom (UK), adding that depending on the weather condition, it might take between three and four weeks to fix the broken cables.

He said: “In terms of the repair time of the cable, the ships have been mobilized. They are probably going to be on station towards the end of the month. And then depending on the extent of the damage, it could take another two or three weeks to repair all the cables.

“So we are  thinking probably sometime in the middle of April, possibly towards the end of April, have all the cables repaired and the repair will be carried out by each cable consortium or owner, rather than individual carrier- we are part of some of those consortiums and part of the process.

“One of the ships is coming up from South Africa and other is in Cape Verde. And the third is in the UK and they are now starting to head towards the affected area and they will then locate the cable cuts and repair them. And that process depends on the weather as well, if it’s bad weather and they can’t operate in it, if it’s stormy seas, it could take a little longer.

But I would think three to four weeks, maybe slightly earlier if everything goes to plan.”

Wood said the company has restored over 100 links now and brought more people into the company’s data center in Lagos, the OADC data centre, which has connectivity directly into the Equiano system, which at the moment is the only major system still in operation serving most of West Africa, in particular Nigeria.

Speaking on the cause of cable cuts, he said: “Let me give a   little bit of background on the cuts- there’s been a lot of speculation in the press about what caused the cuts of West Africa off the coast of Cote, d’Ivoire and some of it is accurate, but some of it is also not accurate

“What we believed  happened  and it’s still is speculation because until the ships get to the site and repair the cables, it won’t be possible to say exactly what happened, but what we believe has happened is that there’s been a subsea event in the Canyon that flows, that comes out of going offshore from the coast of Cote d’Ivoire.

“And when you look at the timings of the various cable cuts over a period of about 6 or 7 hours starting in the early morning and the cables got cut by what we think is a turbidity event, which is where you have a landslide effectively rolling down the Canyon a little bit like an avalanche in a mountain on snow where the debris rolls down the hill in a subsea and has taken out the four cables one after the other.

“And the reason that Equiano hasn’t been hit is because it is laid much further offshore and at the moment only lands in Nigeria and Togo and then it goes straight out offshore for several 100 kilometers and it’s outside the influence zone of this Canyon.”

Wood said contrary to insinuation about the submarine cables reaching their end of life, he said the affected four cables including MainOne Cable, West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE) submarine cable and SAT3 subsea cable systems.

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“So there are four cables that have been affected; none of them have come to the end of life. Cable cuts happen on a fairly regular basis everywhere around the world, cables get cut for a number of reasons, from a ship’s anchor or a subsea landslide in this case, potentially, or a seismic event, earthquakes and things like that. So cables get cut on a fairly regular basis.

“The difference with this one is it has cut four cables at the same time and that led to the significant outages that we’ve seen. But all the cables are repairable. What will happen is that the ships will get to the area affected, they will   bring the cable, they will locate where the cable is, they’ll bring it up to the surface, and then they will find the other end of the cable further up the coast, they will   bring that up to the surface, and then they will   splice   a new piece of cable in between, effectively, the way an    electrical circuit is repaired. They will   put a new piece of cable between the two broken ends and then drop it back down to the sea floor. All of the cables are repairable. It just depends on how long it takes to find the ends of those cables, and then the extent of the damage to the cable, fix them and let them down back to the seabed, but they are all repairable,” Wood said.

On the cost of repairing the damaged cables, he said it is going to run into millions of dollars. “It’s millions of dollars, maybe between $1million and $2million per cable, depending on how long it takes the ship to find the cable and repair it. And those costs are borne by the cable owners themselves. And then it’s a cost that we will factor into our businesses because these things do happen.

“I can’t say exact figures because it depends on the nature of the cuts; how long it takes to repair them, but it’s when you look at the four systems together it is several, several millions of dollars.

“And in terms of the impact on other countries, yes, there has been different levels of impact have been felt by different countries. Equiano lands in Nigeria, so there are restoration opportunities there. It lands in Togo, so there’s restoration opportunity in Togo, but it doesn’t land in Ghana, for example, or Code d’Ivoire.

“So there’s very limited capability to restore those networks at this time because there isn’t the same level of network diversity. We’re working with our partners to land Equiano in Ghana and we’re working with the government and regulator there to acquire the correct licenses and everything to bring Equiano into Ghana and hopefully that will be done as fast as possible and any future events like this will have a smaller impact,” he said.

On whether the cables could be monitored real time, he said it was possible to do so. “Actually there is a real time monitoring system that monitors all major shipping. Each major ship has a transponder which shows its location and that is tracked and if a large ship gets very close to a cable there, they’re always possibilities for warning to keep away.

“If it’s clearly drifting or something like that, but the ships do travel across the top of the cables, which are several 1000 meters down on a regular basis. What tends to happen is if there is a cut you can pinpoint potentially the ship that did it. If it indeed was a ship that cut a cable through this system, there is one monitoring capability. In terms of the time it takes to contact a ship, it’s quite challenging, I would imagine, to actually prevent such an occurrence because you wouldn’t know it’s happening until it has It almost happened that you can see a ship near a cable, but you don’t know whether the anchors down or if there’s an issue. So it’s possible to see what’s   happening, but to prevent such a thing, and I think it would be very difficult,” he added.

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