By Ismail Akwei, Africa News
June 27, 2017
Internet connection in Congo-Brazzaville was restored on Saturday after 15 days of nationwide disruptions and slowdowns that started since June 9, 2017, after a damage to the country’s main submarine cables.
It was restored ahead of the five-week projected period given by the technical team working on the cut cable.
Network providers confirmed days after the outage that the problem was caused by a submarine cable cut off in the Atlantic Ocean near the economic capital Pointe-Noire.
Cedric Nzimbou, a network engineer with SkyTic Telecom – one of the country’s major network providers – told Africanews that the “12-kilometer fibre optic West African Cable System (WACS) that connects the country through Pointe-Noire to the international cable was cut off by a fishing vessel”.
He added that network providers were forced to provide internet using V-SAT which is slow and expensive as a result of huge taxes paid to use the service.
This was connected via a cable from Kinshasa in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.
Local media reported that the damage to the submarine cables was caused by a suspected Chinese fishing vessel.
