http://www.ngrguardiannews.com/compulife/article01//indexn2_html?pdate=050809&ptitle=Politics%20of%20SAT-3,%20independent%20signatories%20offer%20services%20prorata

WITH nodes isolated and individual countries among the 33-member consortium of SAT-3 all on their own, Nigerian operators recently said there was nothing to worry about the breakdown in Cotonou, Benin Republic of SAT-3.

A Nigerian company, Suburban Telecoms connection to Benin Republic end of SAT-3 does not affect Nigeria but those companies that have business with Suburban. This does not translate to 70 per cent disconnection as claimed by Suburban Telecom, The Guardian can now reveal.

When it was reported that the undersea cable known as South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) was disrupted recently, it became worrisome for operators across the coast of Africa, because of it immense importance to various operators both in the communications and financial sectors of the economy.

The SAT-3 has among its largest investors France Telecom (12.08 per cent); NITEL (8.39 per cent); and TCI, a subsidiary of AT&T (12.42 per cent) and VSNL (8.93 per cent), with the total investment for both the SAT 3 and SAFE portions of the cable put at US$595 million.

NITEL is Nigeria's sole signatory.

According to the Chief Technical Officer of Suburban Telecom West Africa, Anil Verma, who was quoted by the media as saying that the breakdown was a setback to communication services but that once the cable is restored, the company will try to make Internet bandwidth available.

He said the cable broke down at the Benin Republic landing station, adding that it is, however, the first time in eight years since the cable became operational that the Benin landing station had a breakdown.

Verma added however that the SAT-3 cable has experienced a number of breakdowns, especially in Nigeria, and that it has quickly been repaired, but that with this outage being on an isolated landing cable, users may have to wait for the SAT-3 consortium to send one of its cable maintenance ships to Benin to fix the problem, which may take 10 days.

Meaning that, since the damage was on an isolated landing cable, it may serve as opportunity for independent firms to offer services on a prorata basis to would-be customers.

In the response of the Nigerian regulator, Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), there were confirmed reports of cable cut on the Cotonou link of the SAT-3 cable and this unfortunately has affected services in Nigeria for the reason that Suburban Telecom, a Nigerian service provider, is connected to SAT-3 at the Cotonou end, from where it runs services into the country.

In a recent statement, the NCC stated that getting a link from Cotonou enabled Suburban to introduce an alternative access to NITEL SAT-3 at very competitive pricing which in turn has attracted a lot of customers to its platform, adding that this was the reason why the effect of this disruption was noticed almost immediately in Nigeria because of the fairly huge usage the Suburban link commands through the Cotonou SAT-3 fibre cable.

NCC explained that Suburban has assured them that efforts were being made to carry out immediate repairs, adding that the company has informed the Commission that the Cotonou SAT-3 managers have been contacted by Suburban, and that they have made urgent international arrangements to fix the problem, but unfortunately, the ship coming to Cotonou to carry out the under-sea job will pass through Cape Town and that will take about two weeks.

However, in order to give immediate relief to customers, both Suburban and Cotonou operators are to lease capacity from either NITEL or the operator in Ivory Coast.

The regulator stated that it is monitoring the situation closely and is ready to make intervention that will favour the service users, which will include but not limited to encouraging the international cable operators to have an arrangement whereby if there is cable cut in one country, subscribers can be immediately switched to the cable infrastructure of a neighboring country. This is similar to what happens in the aviation industry where if one airline has a problem with its aircraft, its customers can immediately be endorsed to other airlines.

Nonetheless, officials of some conglomerates, including Total, Chevron, Exxon Mobil, all the banks and several blue chip companies, including telecommunications giants, MTN Nigeria, Zain Nigeria, Direct on PC (a broad band internet service provider), Multi Links Telkom said they were not affected by the crisis being experienced by the Suburban Telecoms subscribers.

"There is no loss on the Nigerian end of SAT-3," according to Mr. Wale Ajisebutu, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of 21st Century Technologies.

Ajisebutu's 21st Century Technologies warehouses the largest bandwidth capacity from SAT-3 in Nigeria and he said that none of his customers had come to say that their services were down.

"There is adequate bandwidth capacity to serve the need of our customers" Ajisebutu explained, adding that "we will ensure that the capacity get to those who need it."

Suburban Telecoms, according to Verma, has deployed a redundant terrestrial fibre optic network into the Republic of Benin end of SAT-3 in order to connect to the cable there.

But independent beneficiaries of SAT-3 services explained that the NCC did not have a clear picture of the realities on ground. Otherwise, why should it be so partisan about the problems of Suburban. That is not part of its regulatory functions.

The breakdown in Cotonou is already a crisis to some companies.

"But this has nothing to do with the majority of Nigerian end users" according to Ajisebutu.

"That the Republic of Benin end of SAT-3 is down does not in any way affect 70 per cent of the connections in Nigeria since some companies including MTN Nigeria which deploy some of their services through SAT-3 Benin Republic have since yesterday migrated to the Nigerian end by purchasing more bandwidth in addition to what they had here in Nigeria," Ajisebutu explained.

Officials of MTN, Zain, Chevron, Total, and several banks also confirmed this saying that to think that all the connections were down because that of Benin Republic was down was nothing but sheer deceit.

An I.T manager in one of the big five banks confirmed to The Guardian that "We read the report and we saw it as a huge joke. Do you think any company that has wise managers will allow their network to go down that cheaply?" he asked, but pleaded not to be named.

Besides, according to him, whatever is in SAT-3 Benin Republic is remote connection, or a sort of back-up.

Direct on PC's Director of Sales, Mr. Anurag Garg, said DOPC was not in any way affected by the situation in Benin Republic. "We are connected to SAT-3 Nigeria via 21st Century Technologies and we also have a hub in Germany and so our services are up and running."

Ajisebutu said some of those companies connected to SAT-3 in Benin Republic including MTN Nigeria have since acquired more bandwidth from 21st Century for their operations.

He said the public should not be deceived into believing what is not true; "because as I tell you right now, SAT-3 Nigeria is okay, in fact, companies are buying more capacity".

Nigerian SAT-3 is well equipped to cope with the traffic from this country irrespective of the volume of business.

A top official of Exxo Mobil said, "there was no truth that 70 per cent of bandwidth connection in Nigeria was down."

Ajisebutu explained that 21st Century Technology is able and capable in meeting the demand since "we hold the largest bandwidth warehouse in Nigeria on behalf of NITEL."

In a chat with reporters recently, Mr. Remi Adebonojo, Head of Risk Management and Consulting at Kedari Capital, said the impact the failure has had on banks, some telecoms firms has sufficiently highlighted the lack of preparedness for the crystallisation of operational risk incidents within these organisations.

According to Adebonojo, operational risk occurs when an organisation suffers a direct or indirect loss due to an inadequacy or breakdown of internal processes, systems, people or external events. "Operational risk management would help to minimise day to day losses and reduce the occurrence of costly incidents, therefore allowing the organisation focus on its core business," he said.

It was also reported that some other organisations that suffered similar fate were the telecom firms. Some could not process international and roaming calls as well as provide services to subscribers. Such services that were impeded include subscribers on mobile internet and blackberry services.

However, Adebonojo highlighted the lack of operational risk management in some of these organisations. He therefore pointed out that operational risk as a discipline of risk management has grown in importance over the past few years due to the Basel II accord, which requires organisations to quantify risk and set aside capital to cover unexpected losses that may arise from it.

His words: "The operational risk management focus has been mainly within banks, and their interest lies squarely on the capital allocation element and not necessarily about reaping the full benefits of operational risk management.

Adebonojo therefore offered solutions to the issue of operational risk management. He said if the banks, telecoms and other organisations had a fully implemented business continuity plan in place, there would be no need to scramble around in search of alternative internet providers, rather these organisations would benefit from a coordinated approach, which would have been tried and tested and therefore mitigating their exposure to such an outage.

Such response, according to him, could be putting in place alternative communication systems that do not run on the main SAT-3 cable, like satellite transmitters/receivers or simply implementing agreed manual processes which will allow organisations to carry out their core functions.

He further stated that under operational risk management, one of the core requirements for an organisation is to map key processes, systems, products, functions and analyse dependencies and measure the impact of unavailability.

"Based on the result of this measurement a strategic response should be put in place, which is considered as a business continuity management plan. This plan if painstakingly done and tested regularly will help to reduce knee-jerk reactions to operational failures such as the current SAT-3 issue."