Submarine landslide in Africa caused underwater cables to break
The interior of the Léon Thévenin boat. Photo with Jean-Baptiste Dodane2015, on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
The transfer of data to the Internet is directly dependent on the right of sea vessels to operate and the skills of their crews to lay, support and repair cables on the seabed. When a cable breaks, connectivity is lost.
The marine vessels Léon Thévenin and CS Sovereign reaffirmed this when it took almost 60 days to complete repairs to submarine cables to the seabed to restore internet connectivity infrastructure that severely affected West Africa and South Africa.
Although the Internet can be accessed via mobile phone networks, satellites or terrestrial fiber optic cables, global data exchange depends on these undersea cable systems, consisting of 600 active cables.
On March 14, the West Africa (WACS), Coastal Africa to Europe (ACE), SAT3 and MainOne submarine cables failed. The failures were the result of natural cuts off the coasts of Ivory Coast and Senegal, Main One Service said, the company responsible for operating one of the cables. Their preliminary research suggests that seismic activity on the sea floor could cause the incisions.
Fallas y cortes en los cables submarines Cable System de West Africa (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3 y MainOne están afectando la connectidad a Internet en África Occidental y South Africa. Muestran los datos de ruteo recovered por @IODA_live. pic.twitter.com/5OC5GLi9Qi
— Jacobo Nájera (@jacobonajera) March 14, 2024
Faults and outages on the West African Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3 and MainOne submarine cables are affecting internet connectivity in West Africa and South Africa. Displays the routing data retrieved from @IODA_live.
After the failures, the telecommunications regulator of Ghana, one of the affected countries, said the submarine cable system had lost between 90 and 100 percent of its contagious capacity.
The report was published from the Internet Society shows that the failures affected access in 13 African countries located off the coast of West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cote d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Togo. Consequently, it caused degraded services and almost total internet outages. Additionally, Internet routing data retrieved from Africa by the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) Project at Georgia Tech matches the Internet Society’s findings.
The interior of the Léon Thévenin boat. Photo with Jean-Baptiste Dodane2015, on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
The telecommunications research company TeleGeography has documented that, on average, there are 100 failures per year in submarine cables worldwide. They also explain that you rarely hear about them because, in most cases, ISPs distribute their networks between different cables so that if one breaks, your network can run smoothly over other cables while it’s being repaired.
In Africa there are unequal situations. Anthropologist Jess Auerbach, who studies the connectivity infrastructure in the country, participated The conversation that:
Fiber optic cables now literally encircle Africa, although some parts of the continent are much better connected than others. This is because both public and private organizations have made significant investments over the past ten years.
Based on an interactive map of fiber optic cables, it is clear that South Africa is in a relatively good position. When the failures occurred, the network was affected for a few hours before Internet traffic was rerouted. a technical process that depends both on the existence of alternative routes and on the corporate agreements that will allow the rerouting. It’s the same as driving using a tool like Google Maps. If an accident happens on the road, it finds another way to take you to your destination.
But in many African countries – including Sierra Leone and Liberia – most of the cables don’t have spurs (the equivalent of off-road ramps), so only one fiber optic cable actually comes into the country. Internet traffic from these countries basically stops when the wire breaks.
The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) indicates that cable damage caused by landslides or earthquakes accounts for less than 10 percent of documented failures. Another cause is accidents involving fishing vessels and the impact of dragging their anchors, which account for two-thirds of all accidents. Less often, it happens due to deliberate sabotage or a shark bite.
The Leon Thevenin left Cape Town for the Ivory Coast, where arrived on March 29 to repair the SAT-3 cable. Repairs on the ACE cable were completed on 17 April, on WACS on 30 April and finally on MainOne on May 11.
Auerbach says, “These are uniquely skilled craftsmen and technicians who retrieve and repair cables, sometimes from depths of many kilometers under the ocean.”
The interior of the Léon Thévenin boat. Photo with Jean-Baptiste Dodane2015, on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
One of the current trends that the researcher also points out is that cable financing used to be a mix of public and private associations, but now there are more large private companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Huawei. “This has serious implications for the control and monitoring of digital infrastructure,” he notes. This would mean that it is potentially a risk to digital sovereignty.
Maintaining global Internet connectivity directly depends on the right to operate these types of ships, as well as the knowledge and skills of their crews, who guarantee the navigation and maintenance of submarine cables that distribute Internet traffic across the seas.
