WIOCC’S STRATEGIC ROLE IN ADDRESSING SUBSEA CABLE OUTAGES
WIOCC, Africa’s digital backbone, has said it is leading the continent’s response to the cable cuts currently affecting the WACS, ACE, Main One and SAT3 subsea systems on Africa’s western seaboard.
WIOCC’s highly resilient network, with hyperscale capacity on every major system is the largest in Africa and ideally placed to swiftly deliver restoration solutions to hyperscalers, fixed and mobile carriers, internet service providers and other clients, enabling them to quickly re-establish key traffic routes into, within and out of Africa, thereby minimising performance degradation for their end-customers.
According to Chris Wood, CEO of WIOCC, when the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d’Ivoire, their engineering, operations, and field teams immediately sprang into action.
Wood stated, “For the past 48 hours, our teams have been working tirelessly alongside our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers. Within the next 24 hours, we will have activated an unprecedented additional 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across the unaffected cables in our network. This is to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers.”
He highlighted that clients connected directly at Open Access Data Centres (OADC) data centers in South Africa and Nigeria are already shielded from the impact of the subsea outages due to the unique redundancy and scale of the WIOCC core backbone. Additionally, in Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fiber pair, remains unaffected by the incident off Cote d’Ivoire. Wood emphasized that WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data center, establishing a resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and providing direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa. Consequently, OADC’s data centers and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are pivotal in restoring services to affected facilities and operators in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent.
Ryan Sher, WIOCC’s Group Chief Operating Officer, underscored their priority to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for clients. Sher explained, “We have invested significantly in deploying diverse, highly scalable national and international connectivity to meet the uptime requirements of our wholesale client base.” He emphasized that their substantial investments allow them to consistently carry extra capacity, enabling rapid response to unexpected network disruptions and deployment of short-term restoration solutions for other operators as needed. Sher encouraged any service provider affected by these outages to reach out to explore available options.
He noted that WIOCC’s strategic deployment of converged, open-access digital infrastructure at a hyperscale level, combined with unrivaled resiliency, enables them to meet and anticipate the needs of Africa’s wholesale community, providing sufficient scale and network diversity to address even the most challenging situations.
From the News Source: Techeconomy
