Protect submarine cables from breaches – Ms Hammer

The lack of protection of the multimillion dollar fibre optic cables in the sea by maritime authorities have led to frequent breaches by ships and fishermen, resulting in disruption of services. But there is a strong caution as reported by Charles Benoni Okine.

The Deputy Minister of Communications, Ms Victoria Hammer, has called on maritime authorities to help protect the submarine cables from occasional breaches to avoid the disruption of supply of service to the ICT industry in the country.

She also stressed the need for the fishing communities to be involved in educational programmes to enable them to appreciate the importance of the fibre optic infrastructure in the nation’s development.

Ms Hammer made the call at the weekend during the inauguration of the fifth submarine fibre optic cable meant to increase the country bandwidth capacity from 7.2 terabytes held by Glo One; Main One, Vodafone SAT 3 and West Africa Cables (WACS) held by MTN, to 12.3 terabytes with the addition of 5.1 terabytes from ACE.

The $700 million cable which was landed by Africa Coast To Europe (ACE), a consortium of 16 operators in the telecoms industry including Expresso in Ghana, is 17,000 kilometres long.

ACE submarine communications cable is a cable system along the west coast of Africa between France and South Africa managed by a consortium of 16 operators and administrations headed by France Telecom and Orange.

The cable was manufactured by Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) and was laid by ships from ASN and France Telecom Marine.

The first phase of the fiber optic cable was put in service on December 15, 2012, with an official inauguration ceremony held on December 19, 2012 in Banjul, The Gambia.

The ACE Cable will eventually connect 23 countries, either directly for coastal countries or through land links for landlocked countries, like Mali and Niger and it will be the first international submarine cable to land in Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia, Guinea, Liberia, Mauritania, Sao Tome and Principe and Sierra Leone.

“We are seeking to build a telecommunications industry that is robust, vibrant and efficient and which will be the impetus for economic development of the country”, the Deputy Communications Minister said adding that,  when breaches of the submarine fibre-optic cables occur, they effectively cut the nation out of the global communications.

Deregulating submarine cable sector

In 2007, it was observed in the national Telecom Policy that the arrangement where the then Ghana telecom owned and operated accesses to the SAT-3 international cable represented an important bottleneck resource over which Ghana Telecom held significant market power.

Accordingly, the National Communications Authority (NCA) the industry regulator was called upon to exercise its regulatory authority over access to and the pricing of the SAT_3 transmission links to other operators in the interest of promoting fair competition and cost effective development of the telecom sector.

According to the NCA, in its bid to exercise its regulatory authority, it observed that deregulation of the sub-marine cable sector was the most effective means of regulating prices and enhancing access.

That led to the granting of landing rights licenses firs to Main One and subsequently Glo-1, WACS and now ACE.

The landing of the first two had an impact on prices and access and it is therefore expected that the landing of the latest one would further correct the pricing imbalances in the market.

The Deputy Director-General of the NCA, Mr Albert Enninful who was the function also hinted that the NCA had observed another bottleneck in the data sub-sector which had to do with limited deployment of data networks in what he termed as the “golden triangle of Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi”.

According to him there was also a focus on corporate clientele by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who tended to neglect homes and small businesses.

To address this, he said “the Authority decided to issue broadband wireless access licenses in January 2009 and Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) licenses to potential 4G networks in 2013” adding that “These licenses have rollout targets that include the coverage of all district capitals midway through the license duration”.