SAT-3 Service Cut Leaves Internet Users Stranded

The growth in the Nigerian internet data market has suffered a major setback as SAT-3, the 15,000km undersea cable which lands in eight West African countries including Nigeria as it winds its way between Europe and South Africa has been severely damaged, Nigeria CommunicationsWeek can report.

The cut is thought to have been caused by the reclamation of Bar Beach by the Lagos state government under its Eko Atlantic project, a new city under construction off Bar Beach, Victoria Island: a stretch of coastline adjacent to Lagos.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that the cut on SAT-3 occurred June last year at the ‘Beach Manhole’ of the infrastructure- which is the first landing point of an undersea cable.

Because of the cut, companies have being forced to use alternatives - such as Glo 1, MainOne and WACS as well as satellite links - to maintain connections to the rest of the world.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek gathered that repairs of the cut section of the cable have become impossible as a result of the depth of the sea.

The sea has reportedly become shallow because of sand filling going on and would not enable cable ship effect repairs of the cut section of undersea cable.

Because of the problem, that the management of the SAT-3 infrastructure and Lagos State government have decided to relocate the Beach Manhole of the infrastructure to a location that is far from the Eko Atlantic.

Nigeria CommunicationsWeek learnt that the repair of cut on undersea cable will take a minimum of three weeks.

The repair will involve renting of a cable ship from Cape Town in South Africa which is the only country where the ship is available in Africa; processing of custom papers; obtaining approvals from NIMASA and other agencies required to allow the ship to come into the country’s waters.

The total available bandwidth capacity from undersea cables’ infrastructure in the country is put at 7,862 Synchronous Transport Module, level 1 (STM-1).

The STM-1 frame is the basic transmission format for SDH—the first level of the synchronous digital hierarchy. There is 155 megabyte per second in an STM-1 frame.

The increase in the bandwidth capacity from fiber links is anchored on the landing of three submarine cable, MainOne, Glo 1 and West Africa Cable System (WACS) that added 7,795 STM-1 to the capacity.

As at 2009 fiber link capacity available in the country were provided through SAT-3 operated by Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) and Suburban Telecom. SAT-3 has 64 STM-1 capacity out of which 30 is demanded while Suburban contributes 3 STM-1 bringing available capacity in the country from the fiber optic infrastructure to 67 STM-1.

Mr. Mohammed Rudman, managing director, Internet Exchange Point of Nigeria, said that the increase in capacity has translate into cheaper cost of bandwidth as operators now spend less on their required bandwidth for service delivery.

This has started happening as the cost of international bandwidth has drop from $800 per megabyte per second to some $300 for the capacity.