Sat-3 develops fault in August again
By Prince Osuagwu & Laide Akinboade
Nigerian Internet users may again begin to experience disruption from this week as the Nigerian Telecommunications PLC, NITEL, at the weekend, indicated a fault in the SAT-3 cable.
According to NITEL, the fault was caused by a ship that maliciously anchored on the non-anchor zone of the high sea which caused a cut in the SAT3 submarine cable.
Nitel however noted that the effective use of its world class Automatic Identification System (AIS) , helped it and its SAT-3 Network Administrator in South Africa to detect the ship on the non-anchor zone.
NITEL’s AIS system is deployed at the NECOM house Lagos. It is a satellite based monitoring system that monitors the movement of ships and vessels around the SAT-3 cable line on the Atlantic Ocean.
Management of Nitel however said that after discovering the ship and possible damage it may do to the submarine cable, it immediately notified the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) to redirect the ship from the non-anchor zone, but that NPA did not respond adequately and the cable eventually had a cut which resulted in a sudden service disruption since 2.am on Friday.
NITEL however said that it has been able to localize the fault at about 12KM from the SAT-3 Cable station inside the high sea and has already deployed the cable repair ship for immediate service restoration.
Almost the same time in August 2009, SAT-3 Cable also had a cut which threatened about 70 Percent Internet Capacity in the country. Just like this latest one happened on a weekend, the 2009 incident also happened between a Sunday night and the following Monday morning and left subscribers like MTN, Suburban, banks and other corporate organisations counting losses
Nitel later announced that the fault developed at the Benin landing station of the SAT3 cable which hit both traffic sent direct from Lagos and Suburban Telecom’s terrestrial route to the Benin landing station.
The problem lasted for at least ten clear days from that Monday before it was rectified. Meanwhile the incident had already disrupted the services of a lot of networks and service providers who depended on the SAT3 to service their customers.
The Chief Technical Officer of Suburban West Africa, at that time, Anil Verma, told Hi-Tech that
“This problem has given us a temporary setback. Once the cable is restored, we will continue with our efforts of making available more internet bandwidth in Nigeria at a reasonable cost, as we have been doing over the last few years”.
MTN Nigeria, also announced at that time that the company experienced challenges with access to international bandwidth, leading to service disruption to some of its international and data / internet based services.
As a result, some of its subscribers who make international calls experienced serious difficulties.
Although no one knows yet when this latest problem would last, this is also obviously another sad August for many subscribers who depend on NITEL’s SAT3 to deliver services.
