Massive components of west and central Africa, in addition to some international locations within the south of the continent, have been left without internet services on 14 March due to failures on 4 of the fibre optic cables that run under the world’s oceans. Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia, Ghana, Burkina Faso and South Africa have been among the many worst affected. By noon on 15 March the issue had not been resolved. Microsoft warned its customers that there was a delay in repairing the cables. South Africa’s News24 reported that, whereas the reason for the harm had not been confirmed, it was believed that “the cables snapped in shallow waters close to the Ivory Coast, the place fishing vessels are prone to function”.
Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah, an affiliate professor on the College of Cape City’s Graduate College of Enterprise, is at present writing a ebook on fibre optic cables and digital connectivity. She hung out in late 2023 aboard the ship whose crew is chargeable for sustaining most of Africa’s undersea community. She spoke to The Dialog Africa concerning the significance of those cables.
1. What is the geographical extent of Africa’s present undersea community?
Fibre optic cables now actually encircle Africa, although some components of the continent are much better linked than others. It is because each private and non-private organisations have made main investments up to now ten years.
Primarily based on an interactive map of fibre optic cables, it is clear that South Africa is in a comparatively good place. When the breakages occurred, the community was affected for just a few hours earlier than the web visitors was rerouted; a technical course of that relies upon each on there being various routes out there and company agreements in place to allow the rerouting. It is the identical as driving utilizing a instrument like Google Maps. If there’s an accident on the street it finds one other approach to get you to your vacation spot.
However, in a number of African international locations – together with Sierra Leone and Liberia – a lot of the cables do not have spurs (the equal of off-ramps on the street), so just one fibre optic cable truly comes into the nation. Web visitors from these international locations mainly stops when the cable breaks.
Naturally that has large implications for each facet of life, enterprise and even politics. While some communication might be rerouted by way of satellites, satellite tv for pc visitors accounts for only about 1% of digital transmissions globally. Even with interventions equivalent to satellite-internet distribution service Starlink it is nonetheless a lot slower and rather more costly than the connection supplied by undersea cables.
Principally all web for normal folks depends on fibre optic cables. Even landlocked international locations depend on the community, as a result of they’ve agreements with international locations with touchdown stations – highly-secured buildings near the ocean the place the cable comes up from underground and is plugged into terrestrial techniques. For instance southern Africa’s web comes largely by connections in Melkbosstrand, simply outdoors Cape City, and Mtunzini in northern KwaZulu-Natal, each in South Africa. Then it is routed overland to numerous neighbours.
Every fibre optic cable is extraordinarily costly to construct and to take care of. Relying on the technical specs (cables can have extra or fewer fibre threads and allow totally different speeds for digital visitors) there are complicated authorized agreements in place for who’s chargeable for which features of upkeep.
2. What prompted you to put in writing a ebook concerning the social historical past of fibre optic cables in Africa?
I first visited Angola in 2011 to begin work for my PhD project. The web was all however non-existent – sending an e-mail took a number of minutes on the time. Then I went again in 2013, after the South Atlantic Cable System went into operation. It made an unbelievable distinction: abruptly Angola’s digital ecosystem was up and operating and all people was on-line.
Learn extra: In our Wi-Fi world, the internet still depends on undersea cables
On the time I used to be engaged on social mobility and the way folks in Angola have been enhancing their lives after a long war. Unsurprisingly, having digital entry made all types of issues doable that merely weren’t possible earlier than. I picked up my curiosity once more as soon as I used to be professionally established, and am now writing it up as a ebook, Capricious Connections. The title refers to the truth that the cables would not do something if it wasn’t for the infrastructure that they plug into at numerous factors.
Touchdown centres equivalent to Sangano in Angola are fascinating each due to what they do technically (connecting and routing web visitors everywhere in the nation) and since they usually spotlight the complexities of the digital divide.
For instance, Sangano is a exceptional excessive tech facility run by an extremely competent and socially engaged firm, Angola Cables. But the varsity just a few hundred metres from the touchdown station nonetheless does not have electrical energy.
After we take into consideration the digital divide in Africa, that is usually still the reality: you may deliver web all over the place but when there is no infrastructure, expertise or frameworks to make it accessible, it may possibly stay one thing summary even for many who stay proper beside it.
By way of historical past, fibre optic cables observe all types of fascinating world precedents. The 2012 cable that linked one aspect of the Atlantic Ocean to the opposite is laid nearly precisely over the route of the transatlantic slave trade, for instance. A lot of the fundamental cable map is layered over the routes of the copper telegraph network that was important for the British empire within the 1800s.
Most of Africa’s cables are maintained at sea by the exceptional crew of the ship Léon Thévenin. I joined them in late 2023 throughout a restore operation off the coast of Ghana. These are uniquely expert artisans and technicians who retrieve and restore cables, typically from depths of a number of kilometres beneath the ocean.
Once I hung out with the crew final 12 months, they recounted as soon as by accident retrieving a piece of Victorian-era cable after they have been attempting to “catch” a way more current fibre optic line. (Cables are retrieved in some ways; a technique is with a grapnel-like hook that’s dragged alongside the ocean mattress in roughly the appropriate location till it snags the cable.)
There are some very attention-grabbing questions rising now about what is usually referred to as digital colonialism. In an surroundings the place knowledge is usually referred to with phrases like “the new oil“, we’re seeing an vital change in digital infrastructure.
Beforehand cables have been often financed by a mix of private and non-private sector partnerships, however now huge non-public firms equivalent to Alphabet, Meta and Huawei are more and more financing cable infrastructure. That has severe implications for management and monitoring of digital infrastructure.
Given all of us rely a lot on digital instruments, poorer international locations usually have little selection however to simply accept the phrases and circumstances of rich company entities. That is probably extremely harmful for African digital sovereignty, and is one thing we must be seeing much more public dialog about.
Jess Auerbach Jahajeeah, Affiliate Professor, Graduate College of Enterprise, College of Cape City