WIOCC, the backbone of Africa's digital infrastructure, is taking the lead in responding to the recent cable cuts affecting several subsea systems along the western seaboard, including WACS, ACE, Main One, and SAT3
Leveraging its highly resilient network, which boasts hyperscale capacity across major systems, WIOCC stands as the largest network provider in Africa. This strategic positioning allows the company to swiftly provide restoration solutions to hyperscalers, fixed and mobile carriers, internet service providers, and other clients. By doing so, WIOCC enables these entities to quickly restore crucial traffic routes within, to, and from Africa, thus minimising performance disruptions for end-users.
According to Chris Wood, group CEO of WIOCC, "Immediately the four subsea cables were severed off the coast of Cote d‘Ivoire our engineering, operations and field teams swung into action. They have been working tirelessly for the last 48 hours with our strategic network partners and equipment suppliers and will, within the next 24 hours, have activated an unprecedented additional 2 Terabits per second (Tbps) of capacity across the unaffected cables in our network to support the capacity needs of other network operators and hyperscalers."
"Our clients connected directly at Open Access Data Centres (OADC) data centres in South Africa and Nigeria are already protected from the impact of the subsea outages due to the unique levels of redundancy and scale of the WIOCC core backbone. In Lagos, the Equiano cable, in which WIOCC owns a fibre pair, has not been affected by the incident off Cote d‘Ivoire. WIOCC lands the cable directly into the OADC data centre, establishing the most resilient digital ecosystem hub in Lagos and offering the most direct connectivity to Europe and South Africa. As a result, OADC’s data centres and WIOCC’s hyperscale network are playing a key role in restoring services to other facilities and operators currently suffering outages in Lagos and elsewhere on the continent."
"Our priority is to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for our clients," added Ryan Sher, group chief operating officer at WIOCC. "We have invested heavily in deploying diverse, highly-scalable national and international connectivity to support the uptime requirements of our wholesale client base. Investing at scale means that we consistently carry extra capacity, ensuring we are able to rapidly turn up or re-route capacity to address unexpected network disruptions. It also enables us to deploy short-term restoration solutions for other operators on a case-by-case basis. Any service provider affected by these outages, whether an existing WIOCC client or not, is encouraged to contact us to explore options."
WIOCC’s policy of strategic deployment of converged, open-access digital infrastructure at a hyperscale level and delivery of unrivalled resiliency, enables it to meet and anticipate the needs of Africa’s wholesale community with sufficient scale and network diversity to address even the most challenging situations.
