Internet connection restored in Congo-Brazzaville after 15 days

Internet connection in Congo-Brazzaville was restored on Saturday after 15 days of nationwide disruptions and slowdowns that started since June 9, 2017, after a damage to the country’s main submarine cables.

It was restored ahead of the five-week projected period given by the technical team working on the cut cable.

Network providers confirmed days after the outage that the problem was caused by a submarine cable cut off in the Atlantic Ocean near the economic capital Pointe-Noire.

Cedric Nzimbou, a network engineer with SkyTic Telecom – one of the country’s major network providers – told Africanews that the “12-kilometer fibre optic West African Cable System (WACS) that connects the country through Pointe-Noire to the international cable was cut off by a fishing vessel”.

He added that network providers were forced to provide internet using V-SAT which is slow and expensive as a result of huge taxes paid to use the service.

This was connected via a cable from Kinshasa in neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo.

Local media reported that the damage to the submarine cables was caused by a suspected Chinese fishing vessel.

Congo-Brazzaville is in Central Africa and bordered by five countries and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, where its second largest city – Pointe-Noire – connects the country to the rest of the world by sea.