Africa's Non-Existent Subsea Resiliency - The PTTs

In the last 8 months there have been three separate incidents demonstrating the extreme fragility of the African telecommunications industry. The Red Sea outages included EIG, which has some Northeast African landings. There was a two cable outage near South Africa's coastal waters and then there was the very painful four cable outage right off Abdijan, Côte d'Ivoire, which severely disrupted voice and data traffic within Africa and also between Africa and Europe. 

The common thread is a lack of professionalism. In the case of the West African outage, all four of the cables (SAT-3, WACS, MainOne, and ACE) were placed within the Le Trou Sans Fin (hole without a bottom) subsea canyon. This canyon is well known for debris slides. Yet it did not stop four consortiums from using it. The risk was ignored. Undoubtedly, the consortiums will blame the Ivory Coast PTT for placing the landing station right on Abidjan's beaches. But a subsea cable network is never just the wet segment. A subsea cable is not a network if it cannot deliver traffic to terrestrial counterparts and interconnection points. The terrestrial back haul from the beach, the landing stations and indeed the de facto required carrier neutral data centers are the consortium's responsibility. Between these four cables the capex probably exceeded a billion dollars and the investment return earned was poor. Yes, those cables provide vital services, but they were poorly designed and executed.

African subsea consortiums have consistently ignored the fundamental principles of good design:

1. Avoid geologically unstable areas like the Congo Canyon and Le Trou Sans Fin.

2. Bury your cables deeply.

3. No single points of failure such as a single CLS serving two more cables. Note: cable landing stations are cheap today. One Australian vendor can sell you a prefabricated, modular CLS for under a million bucks. That same vendor is providing one to Google in Guam. The prefabs include power.

4. All subsea networks should hand off their traffic at carrier neutral telecom hotels. Not a luxury, but a necessity.

5. The consortium controls the CLS operators which provide all services on a non-discriminatory basis with cost-based pricing and meeting best in class performance standards.

These principles have been routinely violated in the past because the consortiums consisted of PTTs. Following textbook economics, the PTTs pursue self interest. And their greatest fear is losing their monopoly, not failed economic development in their service territories. So each PTT volunteers to build and operate the CLS for their country thereby ensuring their monopoly will persist. The only carrrier that can use the subsea cable is the PTT managing the CLS. The CLS became a choke point. 😀

State ownership has strengthened the PTT stranglehold because its economic interest not blunts the edge of regulatory neutrality. In some cases the PTT disguises its de factor control by installing an ISP coalition as the nominal operator when in fact it controls the coalition either through majority voting or brown bags.