Resilience: Fibre Fights Cable Theft

The recent theft of copper cables and vandalism of critical telecommunications infrastructure have resulted in repeated service disruptions and network outages affecting several parts of Namibia.

The incidents have caused significant inconvenience to businesses, institutions, and communities.

The increasing incidents continue to place financial and operational pressure on companies and affect national efforts aimed at digital transformation and reliable information and communication technology (ICT) service delivery.

From a network engineering perspective, two factors make this issue persistent:

a) Legacy infrastructure: Sections of the access network still rely on copper. Copper is easily identifiable and removable and fetches a good price at informal scrap markets.

b) Geographic exposure: Some traffic routes between suburbs or towns navigate remote, low- or no-surveillance areas. Thus, the time to detect and respond to a physical breach is often longer than the time needed to cut and remove the cable.

Industry experts note that operators on the continent are considering a range of responses, including: