MainOne has announced the completion of repair works on its submarine cable with a final splice in the morning of Sunday, July 2, 2017. The company has also conducted subsequent tests to ensure the cable is in good operating condition.

In a statement issued by the company, the Chief Executive Officer, Funke Opeke expressed the company’s appreciation to its customers and partners for the patience and support during the recent outage incident on the MainOne submarine cable which occurred on Sunday June 18, 2017.

Describing the outage as a Force Majeure, due to movement in the seabed, the Chief Executive Officer highlighted the company’s efforts to resolve the outage to its customers.

“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. 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 19th 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 2 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”, she said.

She continued “During this period, we had some restoration capacity and rerouted internet traffic on our network via alternative routes to minimize 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 realize 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”.

While thanking its customers and partners for their cooperation and support during this outage, the company reiterated its commitment to transforming West Africa from a resource-based economy to a fully digitized, knowledge-based economy.