02 July 2021

Mladen Vratonjic, chair, The Critical Communications Association (TCCA)

Users of mission critical communications typically operate in environments and/or circumstances that are dangerous, challenging, and perhaps even life threatening. It is therefore essential that they need to trust the communications services that support them. In extreme situations, the communications channel is of vital importance – it can literally mean the difference between life and death.

For communication services to be truly mission critical, they need to be available always and everywhere. Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, road, rail or air accidents can happen anywhere - it is impossible to predict when and where incidents will take place. Therefore, excellent geographic radio coverage is the most important aspect for high service availability. The mission critical network must be resilient, with redundancy, fallback options and off-network communications capability. 

02 July 2021

A new study has found that two subsea cables off west Africa were severely damaged by undersea mudslides, which may have been linked to nearby river flooding.

In January 2020, the south Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) cable, linking Africa to Portugal and Spain was hit by a breakdown in Gabon, whilst the West Africa Cable System (WACS) that connects South Africa to the United Kingdom saw an outage off the coast of the DRC Congo.

Later, in March, the WACS cable experienced a further break affecting international bandwidth.  Whilst many ISPs suffered extended outage periods, most of the major mobile operators were able to mitigate the impact on internet traffic due to their redundancy measures and were in a position to redirect data traffic to other subsea cable networks.