The Liberia Telecommunications Authority (LTA) says that state-owned operator Libtelco and the Cable Consortium of Liberia (CCL) will relocate the country’s landing station for the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) subsea cable, which has been suffering from outages blamed on construction work at the current landing site.
The ACE cable – which has been Liberia’s only source of international internet bandwidth since 2011 – currently lands at PHP Beach in Central Monrovia. However, it’s also the site where PHP Park, a new sports and recreation facility, is being built.
Liberia began experencing internet outages in August last year, which the LTA intiially attributed to a cut on the ACE cable. According to a Facebook post from LTA on Thursday, the construction of a monument at the park has resulted in the cable being buried under “large quantities of rocks”, which has caused the cable to sink and led to intermittent internet outages.
The LTA added thatthe rocks have made the ACE cable inaccessible from its existing landing point. Consequently, the cable will have to be rerouted and the landing station established elsewhere.
Acting LTA commissioner Clarence K. Massaquoi said there are contingency plans in place to ensure at least some connectivity will remain available during the relocation period, although service disruptions will be inevitable. He also said a cable ship will arrive in Liberia on April 22 to begin the repair process on the cable.
CCL CEO Henry Benson said that the rerouting process will be complex and costly. According to news agency Ecofin, the Liberian government will cover the cost of the relocation, which is estimated to around US$200,000.
Benson noted that CCL advised the contractor building PHP Park not to build the monument at the park on the cable landing point.
"We did write a letter, we pushed, but our resistance to this whole infrastructure was ignored unfortunately,” Benson was quoted as saying in the LTA post.
