The Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Ing. Kenneth Ashigbey, has stated that telecommunications service providers are securing new network capacities to tackle the internet blackout facing the country.
All forms of data and fixed network services were disrupted in the early hours of Thursday, March 14, occasioned by multiple undersea cable cuts.
Ken Ashigbey in an interview on TV3’s Ghana Tonight programme on Monday, March 18, noted, amongst other things, that the connectivity challenges Ghanaians faced following the cable cuts are not the same currently as “we are beginning to see an improvement in the services”.
“As we talked about a minimum of five weeks to fix those cables, the telecom service providers and then the undersea cable [service providers] would be looking to bring capacity from other sources into the country.
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He added that telecommunications service providers would be able to go back to the cable source when the repair works are completed, emphasising that “the most important thing is to continue sourcing from other sources as we wait for those cables to be fixed”.
Meanwhile, the Executive Director of the Centre for Maritime Law and Security, Dr. Kamal-Deen Ali, has urged the country to have a robust plan to reduce the over-reliance on submarine cables for data transfer.
Dr. Kamal-Deen Ali stated that there must be “thorough discussions on the disruptions” that can happen to submarine cables to inform future action.
He noted that “disruptions such as this do happen from time to time,” stressing that “as a country, we must have a very robust contingency plan to deal with such disruptions when they happen.”
According to the maritime security expert, there were clear indications that the country does not have any plan to address the issue of the internet blackout, following the incident.