Internet service to ‘bounce back’ as MainOne completes repair of submarine cable

Two weeks after it declared force majeure, MainOne, West African connectivity and data solutions company, says it has completed repair works on its submarine cable.

Force majeure is a clause included in a contract to absolve a company of any responsibility if it cannot fulfill its contract due to issues beyond its control.

In a statement released on Monday, Funke Opeke, MainOne’s chief executive officer, said the company conducted tests to ensure the cable is in good operating condition.

She lamented the effect of the first outage in the company’s seven years of existence and assured customers of better service.

“The submarine cable fault was in a known area of ridges in the seabed, at a location 3400 meters water depth in the international waters outside Senegal,” the statement read.

“After we discovered the outage and isolated the fault to a location 3000km South of Portugal, our operational processes and disaster recovery plans worked as expected and we deployed a repair vessel from our membership in the Atlantic Cable and Maintenance Agreement which left France by 8am on Monday, June 19, 2017.

“The vessel travelled to Portland, United Kingdom, where it picked up critical spares and then journeyed to the repair location which was further isolated to within a two-kilometer range while the vessel was in transit.

“We have concluded a full repair of the submarine cable with a final splice yesterday, Sunday, July 2, 2017. The cable has been tested to be in good operating condition and we have since restored all our customer’s services to normal operating conditions.

“During this period, we had some restoration capacity and rerouted internet traffic on our network via alternative routes to minimise the impact of the outage to our customers.

“However, we were unable to provide enough capacity and interconnection to fully restore our entire network. We realise many of our customers have become solely reliant on MainOne for internet services and we will continue to secure more restoration capacity in case of any such eventualities in the future.”

MainOne’s customers include internet service providers (ISPs), numerous networks and content providers.