Another submarine cable outage off the coast of Africa

According to the newspaper Jeune Afrique, two submarine telecommunications cables were cut approximately 300 km off the coast of Cameroon. These two cables, named WACS and SAT3, each serve around ten countries across West Africa, from Senegal to South Africa.

Already affected by previous outages in 2007 and 2009, these cables are not the only ones serving West Africa, but their disruption still has a significant impact on the bandwidth available to telecom operators.

Companies such as Orange Marine operate cable-laying and repair vessels, such as the Léon Thévenin and the Pierre de Fermat, capable of carrying out these complex repairs at great depth. The duration of such operations (including the vessel’s transit to the area and the repair itself) generally ranges from six days to two weeks.