Liquid Dataport Ensures Network Resilience Amid Subsea Cable Breaks with Equiano Surge

Liquid Dataport, a business of Liquid Intelligent Technologies (Liquid), a pan-African technology group, is seeing a surge of Internet traffic on its new West coast cable Equiano as a result of multiple subsea cables break this weekend. Liquid’s well-timed investment ensured that its Southern Africa customers did not experience a change in their network performance despite breaks in WACS and SAT–3 undersea cable systems off the coast of DRC.

On Sunday, 6 August, we woke up to multiple reports of a natural rock fall in the Congo Canyon, off the coast of West Africa, causing breaks in multiple subsea cables. These cable systems are a crucial part of the network infrastructure servicing the African continent.

David Eurin, CEO, Liquid Dataport

While work is underway to repair these cable systems, it will likely be some time before the complete restoration of services. Liquid Dataport’s decision to invest in multiple subsea cables was driven to ensure high availability for its customers, particularly in such situations.

As part of our disaster recovery process and to offer high redundancy to our customers, we have migrated our customers’ West Coast traffic to our new Equiano subsea cable. Whilst this additional capacity has brought in a much-needed increase in bandwidth in Western and Southern Africa, the redundancy is also the reason why we are able to minimise the impact on our customers.

David Eurin, CEO, Liquid Dataport

Subsea cables are integral to high-speed data exchanges between continents, making them vital to our connectivity offering to our customers. Liquid Dataport’s investment in these subsea cables helps provide seamless connectivity for its clients across Africa. Complementing its existing national and metro fibre networks and offering increased resilience thanks to its connection to other subsea and satellite networks.