Months before internet in SA functions fully again

William Brederode - It will be a matter of months before all the damaged subsea cable internet infrastructure connecting South Africa to the rest of the world is fully repaired, assuming no further issues or complications.

A huge internet outage hit South Africa, and several West African countries, on 14 March, as four subsea cables were simultaneously damaged in the ocean off the Ivory Coast.

A number of online services have already resolved service interruptions caused by the severe outage and latency issues by rerouting traffic onto alternate subsea cables.

However, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which problems continue to persist for different service providers as a result of the cable breaks.

An above-average amount of outages are still being reported in South Africa across many mobile networks, search engines, banking websites and streaming platforms on network problem and outage monitoring site Downdetector.

Subsea fibre-optic cables enable the rapid transfer of information across long distances - a critical requirement for the internet to function.

Seacom

While there is optimism that the four cables on the west coast will be repaired in a matter of weeks, it will likely take months before the Seacom cable that snapped in the Red Sea is repaired.

Ghana's communications regulator told Reuters on Saturday that it would take at least five weeks to repair the broken west coast cables. The regulator reached this figure after meeting with all four cable service providers and discussing timelines.

Bayobab, MTN’s infrastructure unit, confirmed on Friday last week that a cable repair ship had been mobilised to respond to the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) and West Africa Cable System (WACS) damage.

Bayobab and MTN did not provide forward guidance as to how long it would take for these cables to be repaired and did not divulge this information in response to a question from News24.

"We currently have no further updates and remain committed to achieving full recovery as expeditiously as possible," News24 was told.

MainOne

MainOne, the owner of one of the broken cables that broke, said in a blog post that the cable ship performing the repair would spend two to three weeks in transit and the repair will take one to two weeks.

The MainOne cable does not extend to South Africa.

MainOne said that its preliminary analysis suggested that it was unlikely that the breakage was caused by human behaviour.

The blog post read: “Our preliminary analysis would suggest some form of seismic activity on the seabed resulted in a break to the cable, but we will obtain more data when the cable is retrieved during the repair exercise.”

Second quarter

Repairs to the Seacom cable, which runs along the east coast of the continent, are only likely to proceed in the second quarter of the year, Seacom said on 8 March.

The company said at the time that it was applying for repair permits, which it said at the time could take up to eight weeks.

On Friday, Seacom said that its services remained robust despite the challenges.

"Despite the current capacity challenges on WACS, Seacom services remain robust and fully operational, without any congestion on its links that aggregate client traffic," Seacom said. – Fin24