MainOne, a prominent internet service provider, has disclosed that the repair of its compromised submarine cable is expected to extend up to five weeks, as stated in a release on Friday.
The network disruption was detected on Thursday, with the company attributing the fault to an external event causing a severance along the West African coast near Cote D’Ivoire within the Atlantic Ocean.
The impact of this mishap has been particularly significant on the Nigerian banking sector, given MainOne’s pivotal role as an internet service provider for these institutions. The resulting network downtime has left several major Nigerian banks disconnected, disrupting customers’ access to online banking services and USSD transactions.
MainOne’s services extend beyond commercial and microfinance institutions to encompass major telecom operators, ISPs, government bodies, businesses of various sizes, and educational entities. In response to the outage, MainOne has pledged to expedite the repair process and promptly restore network connectivity, offering reassurance to its clientele during this period of inconvenience.
For the repair, MainOne has enlisted the assistance of the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement. The process involves the inspection and testing of cable joints, alongside the careful repositioning of the cable on the seabed.
A critical aspect of the repair involves a vessel tasked with fetching necessary components from Europe to West Africa, a journey estimated to require roughly five weeks to conclude.
While submarine cable damages are often linked to human activities such as fishing and anchoring, as well as natural phenomena like earthquakes and landslides, MainOne has dismissed the likelihood of human interference due to the fault’s location at a depth of about 3 km and its distance from shore.
The company stated, “Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable, but we will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.”
