Subsea Cables & Internet Infrastructure

Most African cables traverse the Congo Canyon as opposed to detouring around it. The canyon is not particular deep, but it is huge in terms of floor coverage. Depth varies from 1400 to 1600 meters. Le Trou Sans Fond canyon off Abidjan drops 2300 meters where the canyon meets the continental shelf. It is perfect recipe for sediment and debris avalanches.  These canyons were created by strong river currents that carve the ocean bottom and also deposit sediment. Debris and sediment slides can easily crush the older African cables lying at the bottom. In contrast, both Equiano and 2Africa are routed around these danger spots. That increases latency, but reduces outages. Sometimes African ISPs are short sighted in this matter. They take WACS despite the exorbitant costs and high likelihood of extended down time because it is a bit faster.  An interesting question is how long will WACS be worth operating given the accumulated optical loss from one or two outages each year. The more ...

 National security analysts please note, there is no sabotage category because there are no credible cases of sabotage. The IPCC study estimates 3,224 subsea fibre optic cable repairs over the last 18 years. It classifies 84% of outages as caused by fishing and anchors, 5% due to abrasion, 4% due to plant failure (subsea optical amplifiers or PFEs), and 7% due to geological disturbances such as turbidity currents induced by earthquakes or heavy rains or debris slides in subterranean caverns. Abrasion often leads to shunt faults where water reaches the power conductor.