The maritime crews keeping Africa connected to the internet
“These are uniquely skilled artisans and technicians who retrieve and repair cables, sometimes from depths of multiple kilometres under the ocean.”
Submarine landslide in Africa caused underwater cables to break
Originally published on Global Voices
The inside of the boat Léon Thévenin. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Dodane, 2015, on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
The transfer of data on the internet depends directly on the right of maritime vessels to operate and on the skills of their crews to commission, support, and repair cables on the seabed. When a cable breaks, connectivity is lost.
The maritime vessels Léon Thévenin and the CS Sovereign reaffirmed this when they took almost 60 days to carry out repairs on submarine cables on the seabed to reestablish the internet connectivity infrastructure that severely affected West Africa and South Africa.
Although internet access can be through mobile networks, satellites, or terrestrial fiber optic cables, the global exchange of data traffic depends on these submarine cable systems, made up of 600 active cables.
On March 14, the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3, and MainOne submarine cables failed. The failures were the result of physical cuts off the coasts of Ivory Coast and Senegal, said Main One Service, the company responsible for the operation of one of the cables. Their preliminary investigations suggest that seismic activity on the seabed could cause the cuts.
Fallas y cortes en los cables submarinos West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3 y MainOne están afectando la conectividad a Internet en África Occidental y Sudáfrica. Muestran los datos de ruteo recuperados por @IODA_live. https://t.co/LO9AG97CGb pic.twitter.com/5OC5GLi9Qi
— Jacobo Nájera (@jacobonajera) March 14, 2024
Faults and cuts in the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), SAT3 and MainOne submarine cables are affecting internet connectivity in West Africa and South Africa. Shows the routing data retrieved by @IODA_live.
Following the failures, the telecommunications regulator of Ghana, one of the affected countries, declared that the submarine cable system had lost between 90 and 100 percent of its transmission capacity.
The report published by Internet Society shows that the failures affected access to 13 African countries located on the coast of West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa, and Togo. Consequently, it caused degraded services and almost total internet outages. Furthermore, internet routing data recovered from Africa by the Internet Outage Detection and Analysis (IODA) Project at Georgia Tech matches Internet Society's findings.
The interior of the boat Léon Thévenin. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Dodane, 2015, on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
The telecommunications research company TeleGeography has documented that, on average, there are 100 failures a year in submarine cables worldwide. They also explain that you rarely hear about these because, in most cases, internet companies distribute their networks between different cables so that if one breaks, your network works without problems through other cables while it is repaired.
In Africa, there are unequal situations. Anthropologist Jess Auerbach, who studies the connectivity infrastructure in the country, shared in The Conversation that:
Fibre optic cables now literally encircle Africa, though some parts of the continent are far better connected than others. This is because both public and private organisations have made major investments in the past ten years.
Based on an interactive map of fibre optic cables, it’s clear that South Africa is in a relatively good position. When the breakages happened, the network was affected for a few hours before the internet traffic was rerouted; a technical process that depends both on there being alternative routes available and corporate agreements in place to enable the rerouting. It’s the same as driving using a tool like Google Maps. If there’s an accident on the road it finds another way to get you to your destination.
But, in several African countries – including Sierra Leone and Liberia – most of the cables don’t have spurs (the equivalent of off-ramps on the road), so only one fibre optic cable actually comes into the country. Internet traffic from these countries basically stops when the cable breaks.
The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) indicates that damage caused to cables by landslides or earthquakes accounts for fewer than 10 percent of documented failures. Another cause is accidents involving fishing boats and the impact of dragging their anchors, which represents two-thirds of all failures. Less frequently, it happens because of deliberate sabotage or shark bites.
The Leon Thevenin departed from Cape Town to the Ivory Coast, where it arrived on March 29 to repair the SAT-3 cable. Repairs to the ACE cable were completed on April 17, the WACS on April 30, and, finally, the MainOne on May 11.
Auerbach says, “These are uniquely skilled artisans and technicians who retrieve and repair cables, sometimes from depths of multiple kilometres under the ocean.”
The interior of the boat Léon Thévenin. Photo by Jean-Baptiste Dodane, 2015, on Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0.
One of the current trends the researcher also points out is that the financing of the cables used to be a combination of public and private associations, but now there are more large private companies such as Alphabet, Meta and Huawei. “That has serious implications for control and monitoring of digital infrastructure,” she notes. This would mean that it is potentially a danger to digital sovereignty.
Maintaining internet connectivity globally depends directly on the right of this type of ship to operate, as well as the knowledge and skills of their crews, which guarantee the navigation and maintenance of the submarine cables that distribute internet traffic across the seas.