International communications are affected By Michael Malakata,Computerworld Zambia LUSAKA, ZAMBIA - West Africa's Internet connectivity and mobile communications have been disrupted following damage on one of the landing stations of the South Atlantic West Africa (SAT-3) submarine cable system. The damage on the cable -- which runs under the Indian Ocean to South Africa, to the West Coast of Africa and to Europe -- has disturbed West Africa's data-transmission market, with service providers claiming that it will take almost two weeks for the cable to be repaired. International mobile service providers including Mobile Telecommunication Network (MTN) are complaining that their subscribers are finding it hard to make international calls as a result of the damage.

Bank services have equally been affected, with many banks failing to provide Internet banking services.

"Access to international bandwidth has been disrupted causing internet and data disruption," said MTN Corporate Chief Executive Wale Goodluck in a statement.

Unlike the southern and eastern Africa regions, which have two submarine cable systems providing Internet and mobile-phone connectivity to several countries, the West Africa region only has the SAT-3 cable.

Chief Technical Officer of Suburban Telecom West Africa, Anil Verma, said the breakdown was a setback to communication services but once the cable is restored, the company will make try to make Internet bandwidth available. Suburban Telecom is a Nigeria-based service provider connected to SAT-3 in Benin, where it runs services into Nigeria.

The cable broke down at the Benin Republic landing station. It is, however, the first time in eight years since the cable became operational that the Benin landing station had a breakdown. The SAT-3 consortium has not said what has caused the cable breakdown.

For the past eight years, however, the SAT-3 cable has experienced a number of breakdowns, especially in Nigeria, and it has quickly been repaired. But with this outage being on an isolated landing cable, users may have to wait for the SAT-3 consortium to send one of its cable maintenance ships to Benin to fix the problem, which may take 10 days, according to Verma.

In order to minimize the impact of Internet disruption, the SAT-3 consortium wants to leverage other infrastructure including the MainOne cable system, which is currently under construction, in order to make services available.

SAT-3 consortium members include Telkom South Africa, Comtel of Cameroon, Ghana Telecom, Nitel of Nigeria, Namibia Telecom and Benin Telecom.

Two months ago, the Nigeria Communications Commission (NCC) called for the joint management of the SAT-3 cable to forestall frequent breakdowns and improve its efficiency for international connectivity. Joint management of the cable means that private service providers will help the SAT-3 consortium carry out regular maintenance of the cable to avoid breakdowns.