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- A Cape Town-based cable repair ship is heading to the Ivory Coast to repair damaged subsea cables.
- The Léon Thévenin, which is owned by Orange Marine, left Cape Town on Tuesday evening and is expected to arrive on 29 March.
- The damaged cables caused widespread internet outages in South Africa last week.
- For more financial news, go to the News24 Business front page.
The Léon Thévenin cable repair ship has been dispatched from Cape Town to the Ivory Coast to respond to the damaged subsea cables off the Ivory Coast that caused massive internet disruptions in South Africa last week.
As MyBroadband first reported, vessel tracking platform Marine traffic indicated that the ship left Cape Town Harbour just before 21:00 on Tuesday and is heading to Abidjan in the Ivory Coast.
It is expected to arrive in the area on 29 March. Bayobab, MTN's infrastructure unit, said in a statement on Friday that the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) and West Africa Cable System (WACS) consortiums had mobilised a cable repair ship to respond to the incident.
This follows the break of four cables in the region that caused widespread internet outages in South Africa and some West African countries on 14 March.
The ACE), WACS, South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3), and MainOne cables all snapped off the Ivory Coast, with initial reports suggesting that seismic activity was to blame. Telkom told Bloomberg that repairs are expected to take around three weeks, depending on weather conditions.
The impact on South Africa was compounded by a break to the Seacom cable in the Red Sea late in February.
Subsea fibre-optic cables are crucial pieces of infrastructure that enable the internet in South Africa to function by enabling the rapid transfer of vast quantities of information across long distances.
The cables look almost like hose pipes that often stretch thousands of kilometres along the sea floor.
Many internet service providers have been able to mitigate the impact of the breaks by re-routing traffic along other cables that connect South Africa to the world.
However, there is still an above-baseline volume of outage and problem reports for a host of mobile network operators, banking apps, search engines and other services on network issue reporting site Downdetector.
The Léon Thévenin repaired the ACE and WACS cables in a similar region following breaks last year.
The ship is owned by French multinational telecoms operator Orange Marine and is generally based in Cape Town, when not responding to a break elsewhere off the continent.
READ MORE | Here's how long it will take for the internet in SA to be fully functional again
Ghana’s communications regulator told Reuters that it expects it to take at least five weeks before all four broken cables are repaired. The regulator met with the cable consortium members for the four broken cables, to reach this assessment.
