West Africa Internet – when will it be fixed?

West Africa Internet – when will it be fixed?
As many as a dozen countries across West and Central Africa were cut off from the internet and are still experiencing significant connection issues following damage to submarine cables.  Now a repair ship is enroute to fix the d­­amage, but it will be some time before services return to normal.  What happened, how was traffic rerouted and how will the cable be repaired, are questions that SOEP will answer. Joining us on the show are Alp Toker, Director of Netblocks and Isik Mater, Director of Research at Netblocks, and Paul Brodsky from TeleGeography, who track submarine cables across the world.

The programme is presented by Gareth Mitchell and the studio expert is Angelica Mari.

More on this week's stories:

Submarine Cable map
Netblocks
Telegeography

Chapters

• 0:00 Internet Connectivity in West and Central Africa

Transcript

00:00:00 Gareth Mitchell 

Hello, I'm Gareth and it's Tuesday the 26th of March 2024. We're in our studio here in London. We have voices from Washington, Sao Paulo and various places on the planet because some of our guests are travelling, we don't know where they are. All we know is that on the end of a connection and they're going to be talking to us. So yeah, we don't call it Somewhere on Earth for nothing, do we? 

00:00:30 Gareth Mitchell 

And keeping us very good company today is Angelica Mari. She's that voice I mentioned from Sao Paulo and technology journalist, expert and raconteur. For these purposes. Hello, Angelica. How are you? 

00:00:42 Angelica Mari 

Hello, I'm great, Gareth. Lovely to be here with you again. 

00:00:47 Gareth Mitchell 

Pleased to hear it that I think the last time we spoke you, you were just getting over dengue fever. Has that now washed out of your? 

00:00:54 Angelica Mari 

It is, it is, thankfully. And yeah, I've been keeping busy now. I'm gonna start teaching as well. So you have a teaching colleague, Gareth. 

00:00:57 Gareth Mitchell 

Thank goodness. 

00:01:05 Gareth Mitchell 

Well, well, well, what? 

00:01:06 Gareth Mitchell 

Teaching you are a woman of many talents. I didn't look, you've. I know you've done a master’s recently. I know that you do all kinds of technology journalism, that your interests are wide and varied, that you name your computer hard drives after David Bowie albums. And now you tell the world that you're teaching. What are you teaching? 

00:01:07 Angelica Mari 

Yeah., yeah, I'm. I'm going to be teaching at the post grad course of uh, future design at Pookie (PUC) 

 Minas, which is one of one of the best private universities in Brazil. So my course is going to be called strategic foresight and imaging technology. So I'm really excited. 

00:01:44 Gareth Mitchell 

That's about basically, it's about everything we do on this programme, then, isn't it? Strategic foresight and emerging technology, you know, so we could just peel for your syllabus. 

00:01:50 Angelica Mari 

Yeah. So I might, I might just. 

00:01:53 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, exactly. So just, I'll just go through all of our scripts of the last year, SOEP and I'll be fine. 

00:01:58 

Right. 

00:02:01 Gareth Mitchell 

Excellent. Well, this is increasingly turning into an academic seminar. Keep forgetting it's a podcast. How fascinating. Alright. Lovely. Well, I'm looking forward to hearing more about that. Should we get into the matter in hand then and do a bit of podcasting, Angelica. 

00:02:16 Angelica Mari 

Let's go for it. 

00:02:17 Gareth Mitchell 

Here we go. 

00:02:22 Gareth Mitchell 

And coming up today. 

00:02:26 Gareth Mitchell 

Why did the Internet go dark across much of West Africa recently? That's the question today in a special edition where we're focusing on one of the undersea fibre optic cables serving West Africa, and we're asking why it failed, leading to widespread disruption. We'll talk about that, and the Internet infrastructure as a whole. Just how resilient are the pipes that connect the planet? That's all right here on the somewhere on Earth. Podcasts. 

00:02:58 Gareth Mitchell 

All right. So Nigeria has called for the West African region to coordinate to protect shared telecommunications infrastructure. The call follows major disruption to the Internet in the last week or so. Services by the African subsea cable operator sea.com went down and Internet traffic had to be diverted. To other cables, major Internet outages ensued across Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin. Ghana and Burkina Faso. So All in all, it was a bit of a pickle. So let's try and unpack some of what's been going on. First of all, with ALP Toker of Netblocks, we've had you on the podcast before out. But for those who have who have not met you already, what is Netblocks? What do you do? 

00:03:40 Alp Toker 

It's good to be back on the show, I mean. And Netblocks is an Internet observatory. We track Internet connectivity around the world and we see when things go down and when things come back up. So this means looking at the various links that that connect different countries and different regions and and trying to see, you know, when things are restricted, also when when governments restrict them to access, sometimes because that's that's happening increasingly in countries around the world. So Netblocks really tracks all this. 

00:04:08 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. 

00:04:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Great Al and welcome back by the way. Nice to have you back on now. Your colleague also joins us today Head of Research, Isik Mater. So Isik, welcome along to Somewhere on Earth. And what kind of research do you do at Netblocks? 

00:04:25 Isik Mater 

I'm mostly tracking the shutdowns when I, for example checking the data, and I saw a dip. I immediately start looking for what's going on because first I so see data. Then I do research, not the other side, you know, to see what's going on around the world. 

00:04:43 Gareth Mitchell 

So with this recent outage that we're talking about, a the very major outage, do you have some dashboard or something where everything flashes in red and maybe it's the middle of the night and you just think, oh my goodness, what's going on? Must investigate. Is it that? 

00:04:53 Isik Mater 

Kinda, yeah, yeah. 

00:04:56 Isik Mater 

I was like, what's going on? Why so many countries are down at the same time? So I started researching about when I started researching that outage. There wasn't so much data or info about it because I detect it very, very early. 

00:05:10 

OK. 

00:05:11 Gareth Mitchell 

OK. 

00:05:12 Isik Mater 

Yeah, next morning. So it was impossible to know exactly what's going on, but I predicted it. Is it? It's probably a submarine cable cut, but wasn't sure about the reason. 

00:05:22 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. And that's something we'll get into in the podcast. It's like how you even know and then how gradual or otherwise it was. So we're also going to hear today from Paul Brodsky. He's a senior analyst at Telegeography. So you're kind of you do many things, don't you at Telegeography, including, which I find very useful, Paul, that you have a map and you map all the undersea cables around the world, and in fact overland cables. Just if it’s a massive great big fibre optic cable and it carries the Internet you map it. Is that it? 

00:05:53 Paul Brodsky 

That's basically right. And yeah, it's if you just go to submarinecablemap.com, it's a free resource that we we keep updated. Yeah, nothing really terrestrial, but if it's a long haul subsea cable, you can take a look at it. You can get a sense of the geography where it lands. When it came into service, who owns it, etcetera. It's a really handy. It's a really handy public resource that we that we maintain. 

00:06:17 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it's. I find it incredibly useful as well. And it's fascinating to see just how many of these cables there are, how many have you mapped so far? 

00:06:26 Paul Brodsky 

Ohh, we're we're up to over over 500 right now in active service. 

00:06:30 Gareth Mitchell 

And are these mainly submarine cables or are quite a few of them overland? 

00:06:35 Paul Brodsky 

No, these are entirely submarine cables. Yeah, yeah. 

00:06:36 Gareth Mitchell 

All of. Ohh OK, that's so why not? Silly question, why not overland? Is it just, are there other means for transmitting the Internet or that that's just not your purview. Are you purely about the submarine ones? 

00:06:50 Paul Brodsky 

Largely for some reason, I mean for, you know, sort of the the simple fact that it's manageable and trackable and it to to to to try to do the same thing with terrestrial networks. It's just an order of magnitude that those networks, there's so much more of them, and frankly, the information on them is much more difficult to get. And this submarine cable industry is kind of an industry unto itself. And so that's one of the industries that we track. 

00:07:18 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure, right. So what I think we should do in this podcast is lead up to the events that we've seen over West Africa. So rather than jumping straight in with like, hey, what happened, why don't we just find out, especially from you, Paul, a little bit about the infrastructure as a whole and then we can go back to the Netblocks people and find out a little bit more about what happened and how they tracked it. So I think many of us just think of the Internet as this thing that exists and then some of us who perhaps give it a little bit more thought, almost find it a bit magical and mystical. You know, that somehow a packet of data from from get can get from my device to your device through this amazing collection of cables and links and microwave, you name it. Can you just, uh, give me, treat me like a beginner here? Paul, what is the Internet? Then what is, what's the basic infrastructure? That's that's the maddest question I've asked for some time. 

00:08:14 Paul Brodsky 

Well, it's a series of tubes, right? As we learned about 15 years ago from a a US senator. No, it's no, you're right. I mean, I think we do, it is this immutable fact in our lives that we can send packets of data of information from pretty much anywhere on Earth, anywhere else on Earth around the World Wide Web, right? Hence the you know. Hence the term, and really one of the overriding or defining characteristics of it is its ubiquity, like literally anyone or anyone, or if we have access to the Internet, you can connect to anywhere else on Earth that has access to the Internet. 

00:08:51 Paul Brodsky 

It's what happens, you know, in between, on those long, you know, those long hauls that is that is that, that, that we keep track of. You're right. There's a there's we we tend to think of it as a sort of this mystical ethereal infrastructure that, it must, it must have something to do with satellites. Right. Because satellites are you know exotic and they're up in the air and they're, and the the fact is that it's much more physical in a way like it's stuff you can actually hold in your hand. 

00:09:17 Paul Brodsky 

It's not, the satellites do play a role, but you know, we estimate anywhere north of 95 to 99% of, you know, long haul bandwidth is actually, it actually moves via these physical cables that lie across land and under the ocean. 

00:09:33 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. OK. And yeah, so the real truth is almost prosaic. You know, it's quite physical. And I mean, the cloud is one of the great misnomers in technology because it's it's just not cloud like it is just physical hard infrastructure of, you know, data centres and cables, these huge cables, these undersea cables. 

00:09:53 Gareth Mitchell 

If we were to chop one in half and take a continent offline, not really, but if, but what kind of cross section do they have? I'm imagining it's a bit thicker and chunkier than the little tiny bit of fibre that I can see outside my living room window. 

00:10:09 Paul Brodsky 

Yeah. So the the actual, we say there, if you held the whole thing in your hand, it would be about about the diameter of a garden hose. 

00:10:17 Paul Brodsky 

Not much more than that, and the actual like sort of the business side of it, the actual glass strands that's you know that, that, that, that stretch thousands of miles are about the thickness of a human hair. And there's not that many of these sub cables. So the older cables were built with only two pairs of these fibres. Now some of the more modern ones are built with 12 or 16 or maybe 24 fibre pairs. That's really cutting edge, but we're still talking, you know what, 1624 strands of human hair. I mean, they're it's just really small. And they're encased in various layers of you know, some protection, but nothing much. There's, like, some steel belting around it to protect it. There's a a sheet of copper for electrical conductivity for the repeaters, and there's a protective layer on the outside of that. And that's it. It just lays on the bottom. 

00:11:03 Gareth Mitchell 

OK, right. OK, I get it? Yeah. So chunks of the Internet held together by really quite fragile infrastructure. And yet Angelica Mari, technology journalist and academic Angelica Mari, this is critical infrastructure, isn't it? Of course it is. And yet, in a way, it seems quite fragile from what we've been hearing. 

00:11:23 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, yeah, I think the, uh, the discussion around submarine cables and this outage in particular does bring to light the vulnerabilities of our global Internet infrastructure. So not only the potential for cable damage due to things like natural disasters, also accidents or even sabotage. So all of that really does raise questions around about the the resilience of digital connections and what is really critical infrastructure. So I'll say the this, this situation that we've seen in West Africa is is a reminder that a lot of stakeholders need to come together to make sure the infrastructure planning works. 

00:12:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and that you have the resilience, you have the backup and this brings us then to the events of I believe it was March the 14th, and picture the scene. It's somewhere in Turkey. I'm going to imagine here. And there's a researcher, hunched over her laptop and she's called Isik Mater. We've just met her and all of a sudden she gets notification ,or something turned red on her screen and she says this is interesting. And immediately WhatsApped her colleague Alp and says something's going on here. Pick up the story for us, Isik. 

00:12:46 Isik Mater 

That's exactly what happened, actually. 

00:12:48 Gareth Mitchell 

It's as if I was there. 

00:12:49 Isik Mater 

And what's going on there? 

00:12:52 Isik Mater 

Yeah, because it was like more than 10 countries at the moment. It was an early stage of the outage. Then we have a couple of countries went down then, like after three hours, other set of countries went down as well. So it's, it's like 2 stages together. 

00:13:10 Gareth Mitchell 

Two stages. That's interesting. How did that go in two stages? Then why didn't it all just go down at the? Because I thought maybe. If so, you had some damage to an undersea cable, then it's all or nothing. You know, it's that. How come it happened and yes, as you say, in staged kind of way. 

00:13:27 Isik Mater 

Because some countries have like more than one cable connected, like for example Djibouti has like 11 subsea cables landing, for example Togo has only one, like Liberia has only one. So first maybe MainOne went down and then like a one went down. So it's like a domino effect. 

00:13:48 Gareth Mitchell 

What would that have felt like to Internet users then? Would it have been instantaneous or would they have seen a gradual degradation of their broadband? 

00:13:58 Isik Mater 

In fact, it is like instant and others are like, oh, I have a slow Internet connection. What's going on? They mentioned MTN. They mention other ISPs and asking what's going on because they have very, very slow connection at that. 

00:14:11 Gareth Mitchell 

And Alp when all this was going on, then traffic was diverted, I suppose, due to the wonderful way the Internet was designed in the first place, you know, emerging from a a a defence network by DARPANET, the whole idea of it was that it was meant to be resilient and automatically divert packets of data if something happened. So did did that happen in in this case, and to what extent did that happen? 

00:14:36 Alp Toker 

Right. So the morning of the 14th was fascinating in terms of routing and network topology because like Isik said, it didn't just happen in one go, but you can actually trace how networks try to recover and restore themselves and also how that impacted other networks that we're actually doing probably OK but then suddenly had to take on the load, the additional load from from these disconnected undersea networks. So on that morning we saw initially, obviously the set of countries involved with the Ivory Coast, Cote d’Ivoire and West Africa, but we also saw very tellingly, disconnections in South Africa. 

00:15:19 Alp Toker 

So. So you're saying, OK, this isn't localised. You're seeing things at two ends of the continent and that is the key point at which you can start to attribute the incident to a subsea cable because you know that things are going wrong at both ends of that cable. So it's it's really a matter of of tracking that stage by stage progression. 

00:15:38 Alp Toker 

You know, we we saw some countries recover in a matter of minutes, so they just switched over to connectivity that they had. They're fortunate they have landing points that, you know, countries that are by the sea that aren't landlocked are a lot more fortunate in this respect because they probably have some other cables coming in, but those landlocked countries often, you know, rely on that connectivity from from outside, from another seaside country. 

00:16:04 Gareth Mitchell 

Paul, it's very interesting to hear Alp say that he managed to get quite an instant signature as it were, as to what kind of outage this might be and what cable was involved. And of course, it was tracked down to this particular sea.com cable. So can I infer them that that it is a piece of fibre that connects South Africa and landing stations in West Africa? Just can you give me the geography of this cable, if you like? 

00:16:29 Paul Brodsky 

Well, to be clear it it was not the sea.com cable that was damaged off the West Coast of Africa. 

00:16:35 Gareth Mitchell 

Was it not? Which one was then? 

00:16:36 Paul Brodsky 

Yeah. So sorry. So a bit of history here. So about a month ago, three cables were damaged in the southern Red Sea. Including, and sea.com was one of those, sea.com runs from South Africa up the East Coast of Africa, around Somalia and into the Red Sea. And there was an incident in the Southern Red Sea involving the Houthis and all the all those activities there that took out three sub cables on the in the southern Red Sea, including Sea.com which serves the East Coast of Africa. The incident that happened a couple of weeks ago off the West Coast of Africa involved four different submarine cables. 

00:17:18 Paul Brodsky 

SAT-3, MainOne, the ACE Cable and WASC. Now sea.com the company sea.com, the network operator has capacity on more than just one submarine cable, which is very common. They have capacity on their own cable which runs up the East Coast of Africa. They also have capacity on some of the West Coast cables as well. Presumably at least one of them that was also, that was that was damaged, so, so the the sea.com network certainly experienced, would have experienced some outages on the West Coast as well. But just to be clear, the cable itself named sea.com is on the East Coast. 

00:17:52 Gareth Mitchell 

All right, thanks. That's useful clarification there. So but there is no, please don't. Sorry. I'm sorry for getting that wrong more than anything and for confusing listeners potentially, so, but there nonetheless there is and kind of this connectivity linking obviously going all the way down where you mentioned sea.com East Coast and, and in the subscription extra version I want to talk about what's going on in the Red Sea. So hold that thought folks because I I do want to come back to that in the podcast Extra. 

00:18:19 Gareth Mitchell 

But the, so on the West Coast, just again just help help me and listeners out here then can you pin down as it were or can you tell me what we know about that link as it were and where it was severed? And I'm then going to ask the Netblocks guys about what they think happened. You probably got your own theory Paul, but for for now let's just sort out the geography. 

00:18:40 Paul Brodsky 

Yeah. So of of the of the four cables that were damaged off the West Coast of Africa, three of them extend all the way down to South Africa from Europe. And those are the SAT-3, ACE and WASC  cables. The 4th cable is MainOne and that extends from Europe as far down as Nigeria ,and all four of those have been damaged. So since countries south of Nigeria, like South Africa, etcetera, they rely to a certain degree on those West Coast cables connecting to Europe, when you take out three of the four cables that are that that connect South Africa to Europe, there's going to be, you know, congestion on the fourth, that that customers are going to get are going to be impacted and network operators then are kind of left scrambling to try to reroute some of their traffic onto cables that are, that have not been damaged. 

00:19:32 Gareth Mitchell 

And as you were saying, I've been following it on your submarinecablemap.com map. It's incredibly useful. So Angelica, let's come to you then. And what you make of all this? Just how serious this is. And there's a digital digital inclusion story here, or digital exclusion when things go wrong. 

00:19:53 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, absolutely. I think it is really important to to sort of recognise all of this as part of a larger narrative on digital inclusivity and and bridging the digital divide. I think improving or fixing the the submarine cable network, there's a lot more than just expanding Internet capacity. I think it opens up avenues for economic growth for educational opportunities. It can help people develop businesses. It can attract investments and advance African countries overall, so it is really important to talk about that because subsea cables are far from the side, far from the site, far from the mine, right. So yeah. Yeah, exactly. 

00:20:47 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, and not particularly glamorous? No. So. 

00:20:51 Gareth Mitchell 

Right. So we've got everybody on tenterhooks here. Just wondering but what happened and what do we know about what happened. So Isik let's come back to you. What do you think or maybe what do you know happened? 

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00:21:49 Isik Mater 

Well, according to the MainOne’s statement, they said criminal findings and further investigations revealed that the fault occurred, most probably due to environmental factors such as landslides and earthquakes that resulted in eight cuts on our submarine cable system in the Atlantic Ocean offshore.  I think it makes sense because the first country went down was Liberia and gonna follow this. So it's probably began with the ACE cable or maybe WASC. 

00:22:21 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah. Well, Paul would, would you agree with that then from what you've read of this situation? 

00:22:27 Paul Brodsky 

That sounds entirely reasonable. There, there's a history of of submarine landslides off the West Coast of Africa taking out cables, so I find this entirely credible theory. 

00:22:37 Paul Brodsky 

Yeah. 

00:22:38 Gareth Mitchell 

And Alp then, these cables they presumably, I mean they are in contact with the sea floor. So of course you have any kind of slip, you know, some seismic issue down there. You can imagine what it's going to do to a pretty fragile piece of cable. I I was just thinking about other other possibilities here alp, in terms of, you know, some people think it might have been to do with the ship's anchors scraping along near one of the landing sites. Possibly. Others have said sabotage. It seems if the consensus is, you know, these kind of natural events, but what else potentially could it be or either with other outages, how can they come about? 

00:23:16 Alp Toker 

So when an internet disruption is tracked you start to go through a checklist of what kind of disruption it might be, so we know already from the pattern that this is likely related to subsea cables, submarine cables, but that doesn't mean it's actually the cable that is cut. So the first thing that we went through in terms of a checklist that morning were, could it be a land-based disruption to the landing point? So this is a big kind of data centre where things are really multiplexed and then reconnected. So this is where you know particles of light are turned into Internet or other protocol layer messages. 

00:23:55 Alp Toker 

And you know you want to check is this happening on land, close to sea but not actually at sea? Is it happening maybe between countries even from a landing point country which doesn't really use that connectivity to a country which distributes it further? Or could it be something else? And also if you take for given that this is an subsea cable disruption. Is it happening near the coastal shelf? 

00:24:19 Alp Toker 

So that is where a dragging a ship's anchor might actually disrupt that cable. Or is it happening in deep sea, in which case you know an anchor won't do it? A, divers probably won't get there. A deep sea submarine might, but that's entering kind of conspiracy theory land. 

00:24:38 Alp Toker 

And and then you just go through that checklist and see what the data can correlate and tell you about that disruption and especially in the context of of that, that fear of sabotage by the Houthis in in in in the Red Sea. That was the context in which this happened. So there was a lot of almost kind of fear and doubt and misinformation circulating that oh, look the Houthis have gone and done it. So it's a matter of dispelling that kind of disinformation as well. 

00:25:06 Gareth Mitchell 

And I'm Angelica's on the call here as well. So are there kind of burning questions that you had Angelica or even like wearing your journalistic hat? You have three top experts here as well. So what have I missed out here? 

00:25:18 Angelica Mari 

Yeah, I was curious to find out what happened in terms of traffic rerouting Alp. So can you tell us what actually happened after that major event? Because what we know is that at least nine countries lost connection to the Internet. So tell us what happened then. 

00:25:38 Alp Toker 

Right. So we saw overall impact to I think over a dozen countries. And there may be more knock on impacts, but we also saw that some countries had a very rapid recovery, almost immeasurable, almost very short, so difficult to measure, they just switched back over to another connection. And in fact, we were quite careful. And in the initial report, I think we didn't actually mention the ones that had brief disruptions because we wanted to check those further. But the key thing is that other countries have had this longer disruption that has lasted maybe two days before starting to recover, and we've seen that Cote d'Ivoire has had this kind of extended disruption without any real sign of recovery. So in an ideal case, a perfect network would actually reroute with almost no observable disruption. And I don't know, I think Isik might even remember some of the countries that had kind of blips, but that actually rapidly came back on. 

00:26:39 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, it says quite a lot about individual nation states infrastructure in terms of just how well it resumes normality after you've had a big disruption like this. Paul just really quickly cause we're running out of time here. But I, can you just quickly give the listener a feel for how close to the coast these cables are. We've heard from Alp there, you know he did say obviously close to the landing stations. This is where you could get the damage from ships anchors and so on. And looking at your map and I I've got it right here in front of me and I can see all these lines following the coast of both sides of Africa, but we're talking about West Africa here. Looking at your map, it's almost as if these cables are hugging the coast. They're touching the coastline, but in reality, how far out to sea are they? 

00:27:20 Paul Brodsky 

To be clear, the our the summit cable map.com the the, the, the, the where they show where the cables are. It's it's really a schematic. So we don't we don't represent that, these are the actual locations of the. 

00:27:28 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, sure. 

00:27:31 Gareth Mitchell 

Yeah, I I guess so. I knew it was schematic, but do you know, just off hand? Are they like 100 metres out or 100 kilometres out or it varies? Yeah. 

00:27:39 Paul Brodsky 

Well, I mean, one of the issues is that in order to land the cable to actually get it, you know onshore, obviously there needs to be a branch that runs, you know through shallow and you know ever more shallow water obviously because you're getting on land eventually. The issue is how far off is the main trunk. And one of the issues with the older cables is that they tend to be fairly close to land. To tell the truth I don't know how close they actually are, and but one of the the the, the, the one cable that is standing that is still running and is carrying and is bailing out a lot of this traffic now is the newer Equiano cable. 

00:28:07 Gareth Mitchell 

Fair enough. 

00:28:19 Paul Brodsky 

which was financed in large part by Google, and they designed that cable intentionally to be as far off of land of of land as possible for those very reasons. The you know the the, the, the designers of the cable were well aware of all of the the problems that the West Coast of Africa presents and the closer to shore you are, the more issues there are with what's called turbidity and and and you know and submarine geology problems. So they built that cable much further west into the ocean and is expected to be much more stable. 

00:28:53 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. OK. No, exactly. And I wasn't expecting you to say, oh, they're exactly this. Yeah. So it's just to get a general kind of idea. Yeah. But rest assured, I've I've guessed this was a schematic that you hadn't actually done it in 

00:28:54 Paul Brodsky 

But I'm sorry I don't have answer to you. 

00:29:06 Paul Brodsky 

Yeah. 

00:29:06 Gareth Mitchell 

geographically precise plots, you know, it's it's in fact I was going to put it to you earlier in the programme that it reminded me of that, you know, the metro map that many cities have. You know, it's that kind of style. OK. Right now we need to wrap it up for this part of the podcast. But I think listeners will want to know, Isik, you can finish us off here. Just how close to normal things are. We've heard that some disruption has carried on in some of these countries. Others have said back on. If you could quantify it briefly, you know, are we 50% , 60, 95% back to normal in West Africa as we sit here recording this on Tuesday the 26th of March. 

00:29:42 Isik Mater 

Well, according to MainOne's latest statement, they say the they will repair it in eight weeks. I think they are sending a vessel at the moment. But from my table it looks like most of the countries well looks fine. I mean they recovered almost, most of them.  But we have interesting they're very sporadic outages with some countries they keep going and coming and going coming and going, like not stable connections at the moment. 

00:30:13 Gareth Mitchell 

Sure. And and it's I mean, it's sad to say that it's probably only a matter of time before something similar happens again. And I have Angelica's calls ringing in my ears here just for, you know, just for a greater consensus and international conversation about the resilience for these particular nodes as it were. I know they're not technically nodes anyway, but at least elements of the Internet infrastructure. Let's put it that way. I think we're gonna wrap it up here for this section of the podcast. I think we've given it a good airing for those who will not get to listen to the subscription version. So I think we've served you, dear listeners very well. But for those who fancy a little bit more that is on its way in the podcast extra. 

00:30:50 Gareth Mitchell 

But not before I've just said thank you, an interim thank you before they hang up the line and talk to us further, to Paul Brodsky and also Isik Mater and Alp Toker and the last two names are with Netblocks and Paul, of course, you're with Telegeography. Angelica Mari, thanks as ever as well. 

00:31:10 Gareth Mitchell 

And to the crew here at Lanson's Team Farner for making it all sound absolutely rather marvellous today. Keziah Wenham Kenyan, the production manager, is Liz Tuohy. The producer is Ania Lichtarowicz. 

00:31:24 Gareth Mitchell 

Is that all the credit names? That was quite a long credit list wasn't it. And me, Gareth someone or or other whatever. Here we go.  That's the show. Thanks for listening, folks. And we'll see you next time. 

ENDS