Ursula Owusu attributes disruptions in fixed mobile data services to force majeure

Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, Communications Minister, Monday, attributed the multiple undersea cable disruptions, which affected mobile and fixed data services nationwide to a force majeure.

A force majeure means an act of God.
She said the disruptions, which occurred on March 14, might have been caused by an under sea landslide in the Ivory Coast and Senegal.

The Mobile networks affected in Ghana are MTN and Telecel.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful gave the explanation on the floor of the House following a request by Mr Samuel Okudjeto Ablakwa, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) Member of Parliament (MP) for North Tongu; and Madam Sarah AdwoaSafo, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) MP for Dome-Kwabenya, for the Minister to brief the House on the disruptions in mobile and fixed data services nationwide.

The Minister said in the early hours of 14th March, the Ministry of Communications and Digitalisation and the National Communications Authority (NCA) were notified of internet disruptions on the Telecel Network, while MTN also alerted them that they were also experiencing a major loss of internet service.

She noted that investigations revealed that there had been multiple undersea cable disruptions that had affected Mobile Data and Fixed Data services nationwide on MTN and Telecel.

However, the AT network has not experienced any disruption.

She said the internet outage was deeply concerning, and had impacted several other countries across west Africa.

Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said the country had six subsea cables with the first submarine fibre cable landed in Ghana by the SAT-3 consortium, which the Government of Ghana, through Ghana Telecom, was a member.

Until October 2023 Ghana had five Submarine Cable Providers -SAT-3, MainOne, WASS, Glo and ACE. Another cable from the Facebook/Meta led 2Africa consortium landed in November, 2023, but it would be live in the fourth quarter this year.

“For clarity, this incident might have been caused by a landslide that had wiped out most of the fibre cables between Ghana and Europe that had a landing station here,” she stated.

She said a separate event in the Red Sea had cut fibres going around the other direction from Africa to Europe.

She explained that by chance, there were two cables that had been unaffected – Google/Equiano cable and Angola to Brazil cables.

Both could be reached by the current cable's consortiums, but following the opposite direction.

However, these could not support the lost capacity with the same quality levels, and the same latency within a reasonable time.

On Risk Mitigating Measures by the NCA, the Minister said in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, the National Communications Authority (NCA) engaged the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to assess their capacities and redundancies to submarine cable providers and ensure that they had the necessary environment to provide reliable services to all subscribers.

The NCA realised that the MNOs and Broadband Wireless Access Providers were connected to only one or two submarine cable providers.

In order to mitigate any risk from a national emergency point of view, the NCA issued directives to the MNOs and Surfline, in a letter dated 30th April, 2020, that the service providers should establish and maintain physical cable connections to at least three submarine cable providers operating in Ghana.

The Minister said the NCA also indicated in the directives that all redundant cable connections should be capable of being lighted within 24 hours in the event of an outage on their primary links, adding that all the MNOs complied.

On the way forward, Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said all MNOs and ISPs would be required to establish connectivity with other sub marine cable providers that were not present in Ghana.

She mentioned that all international services providers should be obliged to connect additional undersea cables, satellite options, and terrestrial links through neighbouring countries.

That mixed infrastructure with adequate capacity was required to provide redundancy to Ghana's international connectivity.

She said the Government had also ensured that the national datacentre and internet gateway had redundancy and were functioning.

“We will endeavour to seek and implement forward looking measures that will safeguard the use of and our adoption of digital solutions,” Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said. “During this hard time of limited access to the internet we hope we can count on the patience and resilience of our people as we work assiduously to weather the storm. This too shall pass. It is possible!”

Meanwhile, the official statement issued Saturday by the NCA on the Internet disruptions said it would take some five weeks to fully restore normalcy in the operations.

GNA