Conference Agenda

Reliable connectivity underpins economic and social participation across sub-Saharan Africa. In many emerging economies, terrestrial fibre networks and the power systems that sustain them form the backbone of digital services. Yet fibre cuts and power failures remain frequent and persistent despite regulations that mandate disclosure and restoration timelines. While policy attention has focused largely on submarine cable failures, terrestrial disruptions dominate lived experience but have gone largely unmeasured, because they are nearly invisible to external outage detectors.

In this paper, we present a systematic study of terrestrial outages in Nigeria, a major telecommunications hub in West Africa, using new ground truth mandated by Nigeria’s regulator. We characterize these disruptions along three dimensions and make four key observations. First, fibre cuts grow from 49% to 74% of outages, and provider identity, not physical geography, determines repair duration. Second, failure resolves into distinct socio-economic modes: vandalism tracks wealth, fibre incidence tracks conflict, and conflict slows security-related repairs by an order of magnitude while leaving ordinary repairs untouched. Third, only 28% of fibre cuts meet the legislated two-hour restoration cap, and downtimes frequently cross the threshold at which consumer compensation is owed. Finally, the best external detector recovers barely a tenth of the database, confirming that national initiatives are necessary rather than optional.

Our findings highlight terrestrial infrastructure as a critical yet under-measured component of digital reliability, and demonstrate how regulator-mandated disclosure can render visible failures no existing instrument could see. The results underscore the need for policy interventions to ensure reliable connectivity, ranging from a notification clock to a public enforcement record.