Liberia is the latest African country to be hit with internet service disruptions, which the Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA) has attributed to a cut in the ACE (Africa Coast to Europe) subsea cable.
In a Facebook post, the LTA said that service disruptions began around 1:00am local time on Wednesday, with local ISPs being “seriously affected”, particularly Lonestar Cell MTN. The LTA said engineers were working to fix the damage, and service providers were “pursuing alternative routes to deliver services to customers.”
The LTA said a preliminary investigation indicated the root cause was a cut on Segment 3 of the ACE cable. That segment serves Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Ghana, Nigeria, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, São Tomé and Príncipe, and South Africa.
However, all except Liberia have multiple subsea cable links to fall back on – Liberia has none.
In September 2023, the LTA said that it hoped to gain a second subsea cable connection via the West Africa Regional Digital Integration Project – Project Series 2 (WARDIP-SOP2) funded by World Bank. That was after a World Bank delegation visited Liberia on a technical assessment mission of Liberia’s telecoms sector and overall digital environment. However, the LTA’s statement didn’t specify which cable was involved, and no further announcements on that front have been made.
Liberia’s only other prospect for a second subsea cable is the Amilcar Cabral submarine telecoms cable project spearheaded by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
The Amilcar subsea cable – which aims to connect Cabo Verde, The Gambia, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, and Sierra Leone – has been in the works since 2018. However, despite reported progress in June in arranging financing and setting up Special Purpose Companies (SPCs) in each country to execute the project, the cable still looks to be at least a couple of years from completion.
