Globacom-1 (Glo-1), the international submarine cable owned by telecommunications giant, Globacom, on Thursday became the saviour of Internet users across Nigeria as other Internet providers suffered a massive damage to the international undersea cables which enabled their connectivity.
TheNewsGuru.com (TNG) reports some undersea cables along the West Coast of Africa, including SAT-3, WACS, ACE and MainOne were damaged on Thursday, which impacted Internet connectivity in Nigeria, Ghana and several other countries across the continent.
The devastating damage caused Internet outages which interrupted the operations of some telecommunications companies as well as banks whose operations depend on the affected cables for internet services.
The damage was said to have badly impacted major undersea cables near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, leading to Internet downtime across West and South African countries.
However, Glo-1 was not affected by the damage and has continued to operate normally, allowing data users, Internet service providers and financial institutions which run on it to enjoy unbridled connectivity.
Industry analysts attributed Glo-1’s free flow of connectivity in spite of the massive damage to its resilience which spared it from the reported damage.
Glo-1 submarine cable system is a 9800km submarine cable connecting Bude in the UK to Lagos in Nigeria and the rest of West Africa.
It has landing points in Nigeria, London, Lisbon in Portugal, Accra in Ghana, etc.
The Glo-1 cable system consists of 2 fibre pairs, with an initial design capacity of 320 (32*STM-64), and upgraded to 2.5Tbps.
The Glo-1 cable system is owned and operated by Globacom Limited of Nigeria, supplied by ASN with a total cost of about $250 million.
The Glo-1 cable landed in Alfa Beach, Lagos in Nigeria in September 2009, the whole project completed in July 2010.
Globacom activated the Glo-1 cable system for service in October 2010.