Undersea mudslide caused continent-wide internet outages
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.
Find out more Zamtel pens MoMo deal
02 July 2021
Zambia Telecommunications (Zamtel), the country’s incumbent telecommunications operator, has formed a partnership agreement with the American payment company MasterCard, in a bid to boost its mobile money (MoMo) business.
Under the terms of the deal, Zamtel Mobile Money subscribers - even those without bank accounts - will be able to make secure and transparent digital payments on the MasterCard network, including international e-commerce transactions.
“We are very excited about this partnership with MasterCard, which is another step in realising our ambition to become a digital lifestyle partner of choice,” said Sydney Mupeta, Zamtel’s president and chief executive officer. “With access to MasterCard’s unparalleled merchant network, this partnership instantly expands the ecosystem of locations where our mobile wallet can be used.”
Find out more
Telecom Egypt picks Juniper and pens Sudatel connectivity deal
18 June 2021
Telecom Egypt has selected UK-headquartered Juniper Networks to upgrade and deploy a network capacity expansion across its national infrastructure, serving a customer base of 9.8m for fixed-line services, 6.9m for broadband and 7.3m for mobile.
The operator has embarked on a network upgrade strategy designed to add more capacity and flexibility through automation while staying in line with the Egyptian government’s Digital Egypt and ICT 2030 initiatives. The network will be equipped with 400G interfaces from Juniper’s purpose-built IP transport portfolio using custom silicon to meet the growing bandwidth capacity requirements in Egypt, the company said.
Find out more How IoT healthcare is transforming testing for infectious diseases across Africa
04 February 2021
In fact, the World Health Organisation says that there are fewer than 5,000 intensive care beds across 43 of Africa’s 55 countries which is about five beds per million people, compared with about 4,000 beds per million in Europe.
However, a shortage of physical infrastructure - hospitals and beds - doesn’t mean that the people of Africa go undiagnosed and untreated both during the current Covid crisis - and in the future.
Find out more