Northern Ghana phone and data services restored after three fibre cuts, NCA says

Pinned summary · as of 04:44

Mobile calls and internet access in northern Ghana are working again after three fibre-optic lines were cut on Saturday, 26 September, leaving the northern belt and part of the Oti Region with badly degraded or no service. The National Communications Authority (NCA) announced full restoration on Monday, 28 September, after repair crews worked on the damaged routes.

What we know

• Cuts to fibre cables on three separate transmission routes disrupted calls and mobile data throughout the five northern regions and some districts of the Oti Region on 26 September.
• Communications Minister Samuel Nartey George and, in JBKlutse's account, the NCA named the damaged lines as Kintampo-Buipe, Wakawaka-Bamboi and Hohoe-Jasikan.
• Repair crews were sent to the damaged lines. The teams came from the mobile operators, which JBKlutse and The Ghana Report name as MTN Ghana and Telecel, and from the National Information Technology Agency (NITA).
• The NCA said on 28 September that the fibre infrastructure had been repaired by NITA and the operators, and that service had returned to the whole affected area.

What's disputed / unconfirmed

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  Mr George put the number of affected sites at 694 for 2G and 3G and 521 for 4G, while JBKlutse said more than 1,200 masts went down. The two accounts are not presented in the same way and neither has been matched by other reports.
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  The minister gave a timetable for the cuts, saying the first, on the Kintampo-Buipe route, struck at 04:19 GMT and later ones hit Hohoe-Jasikan at 11:25 GMT and Wakawaka-Bamboi at 11:36 GMT. He also said he expected services to start returning within hours. These details come only from The Ghana Report.
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  The NCA described a large number of cell sites suffering outages and weaker quality on 2G, 3G and 4G networks, and said it was monitoring repairs. The description comes from Rainbow Radio Online alone.
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  JBKlutse noted that the material available so far does not say what caused the three cuts, so their origin remains unexplained.

Why it matters for Ghana

Losing both calls and mobile data in the northern belt and parts of the Oti Region cuts off households, traders, mobile money users and businesses in towns such as Tamale, Wa and Bolgatanga for a day or more. A shared fibre backbone means a single set of cuts can silence several networks at once. The NCA says it will keep watching network performance so that service quality holds up.