Beyond fibre cuts: building resilient digital connectivity for northern Ghana

On 26 September 2026, Ghana’s National Communications Authority (NCA) reported a significant disruption to voice and data services across the five northern regions and parts of the Oti Region. According to the Authority, multiple fibre cuts affected three separate transmission routes, producing outages and degradation across 2G, 3G and 4G networks and affecting a substantial number of sites. Services were restored the same day after repairs by the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) and network operators.

The speed of restoration deserves recognition. But the event also presents a wider policy and engineering question: what should Ghana mean by a resilient national communications network?

The public notices do not identify the exact routes, network topology, causes of the cuts or the organisations responsible. It would therefore be wrong to speculate about any operator’s architecture or performance. Three nominally separate routes can still share a bridge, road reserve, duct, power dependency, maintenance process or vulnerable geographic corridor. When those shared elements fail, apparent redundancy can become a common-mode failure.

Fibre cuts are a system issue, not a rare exception

Ghana’s domestic networks operate in a demanding civil-infrastructure environment. The NCA’s Communications Industry Report recorded 751 fibre cuts among four reporting domestic fibre operators in 2023. The report attributed most cuts to road construction, private development, utility work and fire.

The lesson is not that fibre is unreliable. Fibre remains the essential high-capacity foundation of modern connectivity. The lesson is that fibre resilience depends on the system around the cable: route planning, records, physical protection, inter-agency coordination, detection, spare capacity, repair readiness and alternative transmission paths.

Ghana has already acted on a similar principle at the international layer. Following the March 2024 disruption to four subsea cables, the NCA required submarine cable operators to submit backup and redundancy plans and directed mobile operators to maintain redundant links and connect to a regional cable provider not landing in Ghana. The same discipline—examining correlated risks rather than merely counting links—should increasingly shape terrestrial networks.

This is especially important as Ghana expands fibre, 5G, digital public services and connected infrastructure. More dependence on connectivity raises the economic and social cost of failure. Hospitals, emergency services, government offices, schools, mobile-money users and businesses do not experience an outage as a technical abstraction; they experience an inability to complete essential tasks.

Six priorities for a stronger resilience regime

1 Measure genuine route independence

Network plans should distinguish between logical redundancy and physical diversity. Two links may appear independent on a diagram while occupying the same trench, crossing the same bridge, entering a city through the same corridor or depending on the same power and transmission node.

A resilience assessment should test each priority corridor for shared ducts, poles, river crossings, road reserves, repeater sites, power systems, core nodes, contractors and access constraints. Sensitive route data should remain protected, but regulators and authorised infrastructure owners need enough verified information to identify common-mode exposure.

2 Map critical nodes and geographic risks

Not every asset has the same consequence of failure. Ghana needs a confidential, regularly updated view of the transmission nodes and corridors whose loss could isolate a region or substantially degrade essential services.

The map should combine network topology with hazards and civil works: flood-prone areas, bridge and road projects, fire exposure, construction intensity, difficult repair access and dependence on a single power source. A route that is adequate under normal conditions may be unacceptable when several risks overlap.

The government’s 2025–2029 development framework points in a useful direction by proposing legislation to coordinate the laying of fibre, water and electricity infrastructure alongside road construction. Effective implementation would reduce avoidable damage and create an opportunity to design protected, diverse corridors rather than repair them repeatedly.

3 Set service-continuity and restoration objectives

Resilience should be expressed as measurable service outcomes, not only infrastructure counts. Regulators, operators and critical-service institutions should agree continuity tiers for different services and locations.

For example, emergency voice and priority institutional connectivity may require a higher continuity threshold than ordinary traffic. Targets should cover the capacity preserved after a single major failure, the capacity preserved after correlated failures, failover time, fault-isolation time and restoration time. The objective is not to promise that no cable will ever be cut. It is to ensure that a foreseeable cut does not become a regional loss of essential communications.

4 Build layered backup—not a single substitute

No one technology provides resilience in every circumstance. The appropriate design is layered: physically diverse fibre as the high-capacity foundation; microwave links where geography and traffic make them viable; satellite or non-terrestrial connectivity for selected critical locations; resilient power; and traffic-management arrangements that protect priority services during degraded operation.

Microwave and satellite links will rarely replace the full capacity of major fibre routes economically. Their value may be to sustain a carefully defined minimum service—emergency coordination, essential government traffic, selected health facilities and basic public connectivity—while fibre repairs proceed.

5 Protect infrastructure through shared operating discipline

Many fibre failures begin outside the telecommunications sector. Better resilience therefore requires operational coordination among telecom operators, NITA, road authorities, local governments, utilities and civil-works contractors.

Practical measures include accurate geospatial records, a single notification process before excavation, permit conditions that require utility checks, visible route markers, joint planning for major road works, rapid escalation contacts and enforceable responsibility for negligent damage. These controls are less visible than a new cable, but often deliver resilience at lower cost.

6 Test failover and learn from incidents

A backup path that has never been tested is an assumption. Operators and public institutions should conduct scheduled failover tests, tabletop exercises and occasional multi-party stress tests. These should examine not only whether traffic reroutes, but whether the alternate path has sufficient capacity, whether priority services remain usable and whether teams can coordinate under pressure.

Each material incident should end with a protected technical review and a time-bound improvement plan. Public reporting need not expose sensitive network details. An aggregate account of the scale, duration, restoration progress and actions taken can strengthen accountability and public confidence.

A practical national assessment framework

Ghana does not need to begin with a large new institution. A focused, regulator-led assessment could establish a common baseline across six dimensions:

1. ExposureWhich regions, corridors and critical services face the greatest consequence from transmission failure?
2. IndependenceAre alternative paths physically and operationally disjoint, or do they share hidden dependencies?
3. ContinuityWhat minimum capacity and services can be maintained during single and correlated failures?
4. RecoveryHow quickly are faults detected, isolated, accessed and repaired under realistic conditions?
5. PreparednessAre failover arrangements, spares, power autonomy, escalation paths and emergency communications tested?
6. GovernanceAre infrastructure records, civil-works coordination, incident reporting and improvement actions consistently managed?

The assessment should produce a prioritised investment and policy roadmap, not a catalogue of every possible weakness. Risk, consequence and cost should determine the sequence. The World Bank’s practitioner guidance similarly emphasises risk-informed design, monitoring, backups, emergency planning, incident reporting and cost-benefit analysis rather than one universal technical prescription.

From rapid repair to designed continuity

The northern disruption was repaired quickly. That is important operational evidence. The next step is to convert each incident into system-wide learning.

International guidance from the ITU treats resilience and recovery as complementary: networks should be robust enough to sustain essential services, and recovery arrangements should restore an adequate level of service when damage occurs. Ghana can translate that principle into a practical national programme built around genuine route independence, critical-node analysis, layered backup, measurable continuity targets and tested institutional coordination.

The most useful question after a fibre cut is not only, “How fast was the cable repaired?” It is also, “Which essential services continued, which shared dependencies were exposed, and what will be different before the next failure?”

Answering those questions consistently would move Ghana beyond outage response towards designed, measurable digital resilience.

About the author

Prof. Abdul-Rahman Ahmed

Prof. Abdul-Rahman Ahmed is a telecommunications engineer and Founder of Stratfound Consult, an advisory firm working across telecommunications, ICT, energy and digital transformation.

Sources and further reading

1. National Communications Authority, Notice of Service Disruption in Northern Ghana, 26 September 2026.
2. National Communications Authority, Update — Notice of Service Disruption in Northern Ghana, 26 September 2026.
3. National Communications Authority, Communications Industry Report 2023, infrastructure services chapter.
4. National Communications Authority, Update 7: Undersea Cable Disruptions Affect Data Services, 22 May 2024.
5. World Bank, Resilient Telecommunications Infrastructure: A Practitioner’s Guide, 2024.
6. International Telecommunication Union, Framework of disaster management for network resilience and recovery, ITU-T L-series Supplement 35.
7. National Development Planning Commission, Coordinated Programme of Economic and Social Development Policies, 2025–2029, section 4.5.12.