The major subsea cable outage that disrupted internet services across West Africa exposed deeper weaknesses in the region’s digital infrastructure resilience, Samuel Yeboah, Group Chief Technical Officer of C-Squared, reflected during a presentation at the West Africa Peering Forum.
Yeboah said outages are not unusual in telecoms networks, especially in submarine cable systems, but the March 2024 incident was different because of the scale of disruption and the lessons it revealed for policymakers, service providers, enterprises and governments. The outage affected multiple subsea cables landing in the region, including WACS, SAT-3 and ACE, disrupting connectivity across about 13 countries and affecting a population of more than 413 million people.
According to him, the incident showed that having multiple submarine cables does not automatically guarantee true route diversity. Countries such as Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which had multiple cable landings, still experienced severe disruption, proving that resilience must be assessed beyond the number of cables available.
Yeboah noted that AI, cloud services, digital financial transactions, education, healthcare and other platform-based services have raised the cost of every minute of connectivity downtime. As more economic and social activities move online, internet access has become as critical as “digital oxygen,” making resilience a business, policy and national infrastructure priority.
He highlighted three major resilience layers that operators and policymakers must now examine: physical infrastructure, topology and dependency chains. Operators, he said, must ask whether they have enough physical paths, whether their routes are genuinely diverse or only diverse on paper, how dependent they are on other countries or providers, and whether too much international traffic is concentrated with one upstream provider.
Yeboah also stressed the importance of regional traffic localisation and stronger peering. Although progress has been made, he said too much traffic still leaves the region before returning, creating unnecessary exposure to international failures, latency and cost. He commended platforms such as the West Africa Peering Forum for encouraging providers to peer more directly and keep more regional traffic within West Africa.
Power resilience was also identified as a key concern. Yeboah noted that critical network sites must be designed with power continuity, diverse last-mile routes and sufficient capacity headroom to withstand major disruptions.
He further positioned open-access fiber as part of the resilience solution, describing C-Squared as a neutral, open-access wholesale fiber provider that invests in infrastructure and enables service providers to access fiber without carrying the full capital burden themselves.
Yeboah concluded that West Africa’s next resilience priority must be stronger cross-border connectivity. Multiple subsea cables in the ocean are not enough if countries lack diverse inland and regional routes. Building stronger cross-border links, improving peering, increasing capacity headroom and reducing dependency on single routes or providers will be essential to creating a more resilient internet ecosystem for the subregion.
