Lagos — The nation's primary Carrier, Suburban West Africa Limited, said yesterday that its customers would have to wait for a while, for it to carry out integrity and stability tests, in compliance with internationsal best practices, before reactivating its services.

The company on Tuesday, announced that it had regained connectivity to international optic fibre network (SAT3) after over two weeks of a major blackout, occasioned by an alleged damage to the cable that connects West Africa to the rest of the world.

About 70 per cent of Nigeria's bandwidth had been affected, causing severe connectivity problems for its banking sector, government and mobile phone networks.

In a statement made available to THISDAY yesterday, its Chief Operating Officer, Suleiman Arzika, said with the restoration, customers will have more than enough bandwidth to meet demand and internet and all other international services will normalise in a few days.

"The service was recovered at exactly 00:32 hrs on August 19, 2009, when their Network Operating Centre reported live traffic to their upstream counterparts.

"The repair ship arrived Cotonou late Saturday evening and commenced repairs on Sunday morning. The fault was discovered 25 kilometres off the coast at a depth of 55m and was successfully restored yesterday (Tuesday)," he said.

Arzika said Suburban had taken steps to ensure that the effect of this type of occurrence will be minimised on their customers in future.

"The fault was traced to a submarine cut at Cotonou in Benin Republic, where Suburban accesses the International fibre cable.

"Efforts then commenced to mobilise a repair ship and crew to rectify the fault. The cable maintenance team had to divert one of their repair ships that were involved in another project to attend to this fault," the statement added.