Africa’s digital backbone, WIOCC, 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.
Its Group CEO of WIOCC, Chris Wood, said:
“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.”
Also commenting on the development, Group
Chief Operating Officer at WIOCC, Ryan Sher said: “Our priority
is to ensure minimal disruption and maximum resilience for our clients.
“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.
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