MainOne Wraps Up Submarine Cable Repair

MainOne said it has repaired its submarine cable system that experienced a fault at a water depth of some 3400 meter in the international waters outside Senegal.

The cable laying vessel, Pierre De Fermat, was commissioned to conduct the repair. The vessel traveled to Portland, UK, where it picked up MainOne spares including cables, a spare repeater and jointing materials and then journeyed to the repair location.

The company described the cause of the fault as an event of force majeure, and following a visual inspection of the retrieved cable, confirmed the probable cause as some sort of landslide on the
seabed which trapped and crushed the cable thus resulting in a cut to both the fiber and power cables within the cable enclosure.

Following the repair work, MainOne tested the cable performance prior to the restoration of capacity.

Funke Opeke, the chief executive officer of MainOne said: “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 added: “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.”

Subsea World News Staff