Surviving a Fiber cut: An operator’s view By Suleiman Arzika
Nigerian Internet Service Providers are currently struggling with a major disruption caused by a fiber cut to the International fiber cable of Main One Cable Company ltd. It is reported that the submarine cable owned by the company connecting Nigeria and Portugal which conveys a huge chunk of international connections between Nigeria and the rest of world was cut at a location about 3000km off shore Portugal (ThisDay 20th June 2017). The report states that it will take about 14 days to be restored.
Main One Cable Company launched its services in 2011 and gradually became the largest carrier of international connectivity solutions displacing Nitel and Suburban who were then the dominant players in that segment of the market. They were joined shortly after by Globacom with their Glo One service between Nigeria and the UK.
International backbone connectivity is a wholesale service which is purchased by the industry’s bulk traders and large corporates. These include the telcos (GSM operators), Internet service providers, large corporates like Oil and Gas companies and financial institutions. For these customers, reliability of service is extremely critical and could make or mar their business. It is for this reason that those who serve them like Main One, Glo, Nitel must ensure that service uptime is as close to 100% as possible.
The issues of service reliability which is basically 100% uptime are what affected the early industry players Nitel and Suburban earlier mentioned. For Nitel, the main problem was that there was a design flaw from the get go. The landing station was located in the Necom House Marina, Lagos. This meant the cable was on a busy and shallow shipping lane and from time to time, ships dropping anchor damaged the cable. Submarine cable repair in West Africa usually takes between 2 – 4 weeks because there are no cable repair ships resident in the region. Submarine cable owners usually have a maintenance contract with the ship owners and depending on availability or class of service contracted will make the ship available. These are some of the factors including time it will take the ship to sail to incident location from its current location determines the period before repair commences.
The period before the repair ship arrives is extremely gut wrenching for cable operators. I can guess how many hours of sleep Ms Funke Okpeke (CEO, Main One) has been getting since Sunday. For Suburban, it was using the cable landing station in Cotonou, Benin Republic and connecting its Nigeria Landing station in Saka Tinubu Street, Victoria Island by terrestrial cable. The terrestrial portion was very vulnerable and led to a few outages but with swift response by ground crews, outage periods were minimized. The biggest nightmare was when we had a submarine fiber cut 25km offshore Cotonou. The repair ship was in Cape Town, South Africa and had to make the long journey to identify and fix the fault (see below extract from Nigeria Communications Week). It took more than 2 weeks to get the ship diverted from another project it was involved in to get us back online. At the time, we were transporting more than 70% of all internet traffic coming into Nigeira and the entire country was affected. For the first time, it showed how much traffic we were pushing and how important we had become in the telecom industry -talk about bad marketing.
However, that incident opened the eyes of our customers to the need for an alternative route and made them start yearning for the imminent arrival of Main One which had been announced previously. For more experienced hands, it was always the norm to have redundancy to avoid such fatal disruptions. The more mature operators like Telkom South Africa, MTN, etc have invested in cable systems on both sides of the African continent with the ability to re-route their traffic either way in case of such breaks.
When such an outage occurs that affects customers’ critical services for so long, it is very difficult for the cable owner to recover its reputation. The cable operator will be forced to seek re-routing arrangements with other cable owners which will increase its cost without commensurate increase in its prices hence erosion of profit margin. And customers are likely to start scaling back on their expansion plans with that particular operator. It may be increased cost for the customer but now entirely justified after such a harrowing experience. Main One sales guys will have to visit all their customers for a deep hand holding session after this incident and the company will be forced to re-evaluate its plans to become an ISP.
Main One will do well to find a way to swap its capacity with other cable operators in Nigeria such as Glo One, WACS and ACE who all have cable systems to Europe to ensure it does not suffer such an ugly incident again. I am shocked that despite the progress made in colocation and infrastructure sharing in all downstream services such as towers, national fiber networks, data centers – the international cable operators are still working in silos despite the clear risks associated with this approach.
The Nigeria Communications Commission may also have to step in and force the issue because the cable operators may find it difficult to reach a working agreement despite agreeing “in principle”. Main One is known for their hard nosed and ruthless negotiation and approach in the industry and will not be naturally keen to share space. The customers as well will have to tamper their expectations with mercy. The Nigeria business terrain is extremely difficult and the ICT industry is in dire straits and needs all the help it can to survive. So if we want faster data speeds, clearer voice calls and cheaper rates, we need to be a lot more patient and compassionate.
Suleiman Arzika
Chief Operating Officer
Suburban Fibre Company Ltd.
