“Bro, I’m lagging bro”, is not what gamers using Telecom Namibia’s internet services will be saying to each other while the West Africa Cable System (WACS) undergoes essential maintenance from 1 to 12 June 2025. The maintenance work is being carried out on the essential maintenance of the high-capacity broadband undersea internet cable system linking Southern and West Africa to Europe to address a faulty branching unit offshore near Swakopmund 

“Despite a temporary reduction in international capacity due to this WACS maintenance, we’re pleased to report that traffic has been effectively optimised across available routes. This means your internet experience remains smooth as we’ve proactively rerouted traffic through the Equiano cable and other alternative channels,” commented Telecom spokesperson, Ndapewa Neshila. 

“We want to assure the public that any other service challenges you might experience are being handled separately and are not connected to the ongoing WACS repairs,” Neshila added. 

In response to New Era queries, Neshila noted Telecom remains committed to delivering reliable and resilient connectivity and thanked customers for their understanding and continued trust as the company works to restore full WACS functionality. 

Earlier this week, Namibia’s biggest mobile phone operator, Mobile Telecommunications Limited (MTC), also advised customers that it re-routed most of the country’s data traffic to back-up systems to ensure continuity of internet services. This was done to mitigate the impact of scheduled maintenance on WACS which MTC anticipated would be complete by 16 June 2025. MTC noted that three of its internet links that run via WACS will be affected, and as such, it re-routed data traffic to alternative backup links to ensure service continuation to customers to ensure minimum disruptions. These alternative backups enable “acceptable service levels” and compliance even when  WACS is offline. 

“WACS maintenance is a regular occurrence and is usually scheduled to allow for repairs, upgrades, or other necessary work on the cable. 

To minimise the impact of WACS maintenance, we have invested in our redundancy links (routes) and alternative infrastructure to support operations and ensure that you as the customer impact is kept at minimum levels as per industry standards,” said Tim Ekandjo, MTC’s chief brand, marketing, communications, and sustainability officer. Ekandjo added that MTC is monitoring the network for any possible swift intervention that might be required. 

WACS is a high-capacity broadband undersea cable system linking Southern, West Africa to Europe, and is designed to support present and future Internet, e-commerce, data, video, and voice services. Its landing station in Namibia is Swakopmund, from which the cable travels inland to major towns and cities in the country. 

The 14 000km WACS cable brings direct connectivity between Namibia, West Africa, the UK and the rest of the world, with a design capacity of at least 5.12 Tbit.