Agony of corporate and individual internet users in Nigeria which has lasted since Thursday is not about to end soon as the latest reports indicate the service disruption may last for a further five weeks.
One of the undersea cable companies affected by the service disruptions, MainOne, said in a statement on Friday evening that the situation might persist for two to three weeks for the problem to be fixed.
It explained that investigations revealed that the fault came from an external incident that resulted in a cut on the submarine cable system in the ocean.
MainOne said the rectification of the fault, retrieving necessary spares required for repair, “sailing to the fault location for the repair work might take one to two weeks, while about two to three weeks of transit time may be required for the vessel to pick up the spares and travel from Europe to West Africa once the vessel is mobilised”.
Internet providers in Nigeria have resorted to telecommunications company, Globacom as massive internet outages crippled other networks. Glo 1, solely owned by it was not affected by the damage and has continued to operate normally.
Data users, internet service providers and financial institutions which run on Glo 1 have continued to operate seamlessly. To this end, telecommunications companies and some banks whose operations are hinged on the rely on the affected cables for internet services went down for several hours.
The damage, according to industry reports affected major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, culminating to internet downtime across West and South African countries.
The affected cables are those of the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3. Industry watchers gave kudos to the resilience of Glo 1 International Submarine Cable which inoculated it against the reported damage.
