A large-scale network failure at the level where you can not connect to the Internet all three days, what is the problem you can see from there?

byU.S. Pacific Fleet

A submarine communication cable system circling the western part of Europe and the west coast of AfricaACE(African Coast to Europe). A part of the ACE cable was damaged on March 30, 2018, and a large network failure occurred in Western countries of Africa. If we can see the problem of Africa's Internet connection situation from this network failure, DNS serviceOracle + DynPointed out.

ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries | Dyn Blog
https://dyn.com/blog/ace-submarine-cable-cut-impacts-ten-countries/

Connecting from France to South Africa ACE boasts a length of over 17,000 km and can communicate up to 5.12 Tbps and has been in operation since December 2012 by 19 telecommunications carriers and organizations. On the map below, the line drawn in orange is the ACE cable.


On March 30, 2018, a huge network failure occurred in 10 countries out of the 22 countries that are drawing cables from the ACE. In the following tweets, it is mentioned that "a failure occurred due to cable damage near Mauritania's capital Nouakchott."

The Sierra Leone Cable Limited (SALCAB) says the data connection to#SierraLeoneis partly down due to the ACE Submarine cable cut in Nouakchott, Mauritania.#SierraLeoneDecides

- Leanne de Bassompierre (@ leannedb 01)April 1, 2018

The following figure shows the connection status of Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Gambia who are not using submarine cable systems other than ACE. Looking at the graph of Sierra Leone (upper left), you can check the condition that the network is completely disconnected on April 1, even if you recover little by little from the failure on March 30. Also, in Mauritania (upper right), which is considered to be the closest to the damaged part, the line has almost stopped from March 30th for approximately three days. On the other hand, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, and Gambia are less affected by cable damage than Sierra Leone and Mauritania. This is because we use cables and satellite communications on the ground in addition to submarine cables in the other four countries, compared to Sierra Leone and Mauritania which are heavily dependent on ACE.


In addition to ACE, BeninSAT-3 / WASC(South Atlantic 3 / West Africa Submarine Cable) also secures the network from the submarine cable system, at the same time communicating with terrestrial and satellite, so the one affected in the domestic network is 1 / It was a relatively small scale of 10 or less.


David Berson, Oracle's survey and analytics department for Oracle + Dyn, points out that "this country's dependence on ACE" is highlighted from this network failure. In order to reduce the influence caused by the case like the damage of the submarine cable this time, the Internet service provider in the western countries of Africa does not rely on submarine cables, but also uses the terrestrial cable network and satellite communication between countries It is argued that international redundancy should be given.