WIOCC Explains Strategic Role in Addressing Subsea Cable Outages

Emma Okonji

WIOCC, Africa’s digital backbone and the parent company of Open Access Data Centres (OADC), has explained its role in addressing the internet disruptions caused by the cut in the subsea cable last week.

The disruptions caused by the subsea cable cut, affected the West African Cable System (WACS), African Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne and SAT3 subsea systems on Africa’s western seaboard.

According to Group CEO of WIOCC, Chris Wood, “Immediately the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d‘Ivoire, our engineering, operations and field teams swung into action. They have been working tirelessly for the last 48 hours with our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers and will, within the next 24 hours, have activated an unprecedented additional 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across the unaffected cables in our network to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers. Our clients connected directly at Open Access Data Centres (OADC), data centres in South Africa and Nigeria are already protected from the impact of the subsea outages due to the unique levels of redundancy and scale of the WIOCC core backbone. In Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fibre pair, has not been affected by the incident off Cote d‘Ivoire. WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data centre, establishing the most resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and offering the most direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa. As a result, OADC’s data centres and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are playing a key role in restoring services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent.”

Group Chief Operating Officer at WIOCC, Ryan Sher, said: “Our priority is to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for our clients. We have invested heavily in deploying diverse, highly-scalable national and international connectivity to support the uptime requirements of our wholesale client base. Investing at scale means that we consistently carry extra capacity, ensuring we are able to rapidly turn up or re-route capacity to address unexpected network disruptions. It also enables us to deploy short-term restoration solutions for other operators on a case-by-case basis. Any service provider affected by these outages, whether an existing WIOCC client or not, is encouraged to contact us to explore options.”