TNM pays heavily for Internet crisis

Internet service disruption in the country and region last week has cost TNM plc K1 billion in potential revenue and the company is investing about K4 billion to restore the service.

Restoration of the service disruption, attributed to cuts to two undersea cables which connect vital Internet services for eight countries, including Malawi, was completed on Thursday.

Briefing the media on Monday in Blantyre, TNM plc chief executive officer Michel Hebert said the Internet disruption affected over one million customers and led to a temporal decline in traffic.

He said the cause of the disruption, which affected over 80 million Internet users on May 12 2024 in the Eastern and Southern African telecommunication industry, was yet to be fully established.

Said Hebert: “Like most mobile network service providers, TNM plc was affected by these cuts as we depend on the upstream bulk sea cable carriers to connect and host Internet subscribers on our network platform.

“Following the undersea cable cuts, only one access point, the Mchinji/Chipata link via Zambia was available to TNM and this was not adequate to handle all the demand from customers, resulting in congestion leading to the slow and intermittent experience.”

Aside from Mchinji/Chipata link, TNM plc taps Internet through Songwe/ Kasumulu link via Tanzania, Muloza/ Milanje link via Mozambique and Mwanza/ Zobue link via Mozambique.

Through the investments the firm has made, it has acquired three additional links with Telecom Namibia through Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation via Mchinji/Chipata border, TMCel Mozambique through Muloza/Milanje border, and MTN Zambia connecting into Malawi through Mchinji/Chipata border.

Said Hebert: “These new routes will ensure that TNM Internet is more resilient and stable in the event of similar outages in future. We were providing 40 gigabyte per second (GB/s), and now after the restoration, we have doubled to 80 GB/s, comes with far much better quality with a minimum speed of 100 megabites per second on 4G.”

TNM plc director of marketing Sobhuza Ngwenya said the firm regrets the inconvenience caused and as a token of appreciation to its customers, TNM will extend the validity period of all data bundles that expired within the period of intermittent Internet coverage.

“We will also offer free Internet bundles to all active data users worth 1.3 million terabytes,” he said.

Following the incident, customers experienced Internet service degradation characterised by either slow or intermittent service, and in some cases, complete outage of the Internet signal.