Seacom may be down for a week or more

Added by Editor on 5 July 2010.
Saved under News, Top
Tags: , ,

A problem on the Seacom submarine cable system caused extensive downtime for SA Internet users on Monday. The bad news it could be a week or even more before the system is restored.

“While the repair process itself will only take a few hours, the overall process may last a minimum of 6-8 days,” Seacom says in statement issued on Monday evening.

“The actual duration is unpredictable due to external factors such as transit time of the ship, weather conditions and time to locate the cable. For this reason, the estimated duration of this repair remains uncertain.”

The fault, between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya, occurred at 11.19am SA time on 5 July.

“Investigations indicate that a repeater has failed on segment nine of the Seacom cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombasa. This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected,” Seacom says.

Seacom has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater. Once mobilised, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair. The faulty element is replaced with a new repeater before being put back in the water.

Seacom says it is working with partners to ensure Internet traffic is routed along alternative systems like Sat-3.

Once new cables systems such as the East African Submarine System, the West African Cable System and the Africa Coast to Europe cable come on stream over the next 18 months, disruptions like this one should become less commonplace as cable operators and telecommunications companies will be able to reroute traffic along other cables.  — Staff reporter, TechCentral

Share this article

  • Ian

    This is TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE. I can only wish that EASSY and WACS were already online. The SAT-3 backup system is insufficient and we cannot download urgently required software for our own use while linked through a proxy server, it’s simply far too slow.

  • http://nybblesandbytes.blogspot.com Nybbles and Bytes

    Acceptable or not, human beings simply have to accept that mechanical devices will always come with downtime.
    Be it cabling, hard drives, right up to anything you can think of that is mechanical and man-made… downtime and maintenance are part of the deal.

    I see it everyday in the technical field – regardless of how urgent it happens to be (each person’s issue is always the most important and urgent one, to that person), the answer I give is always the same – if you are dealing with a mechanical object, it is always a matter of when, not if, it will fail.
    Sure it may not fail within the next 5 years, but then again in 5 years it will be obsolete anyway…

    The EASSY’s and WACS of which you speak – they too will have their fair share of technical issues, at which point people will no doubt also find those issues “totally unacceptable”…

  • http://www.jugar.co.za JG

    Another Reason I am glad, we did not go with Cloude Computing, could you just imagine?? No Internet or Email is bad enough..

  • @Ian

    Ian, you are being silly.

    TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE is it? Feel better after shouting? Technical problems happen, especially on a project as complex as SEACOM. When EASSY and WACS come online I can virtually guarantee you they will also have outages but you know what? People will not be jumping up and down like you because SEACOM will be running and able to provide redundancy. At the moment there is no redundancy for SEACOM unless you include Telkoms highway data robbery which I don’t.

    You are probably an ADSL user so instead of moaning, get online (locally, which is still working perfectly) and sign yourself up for an account from an ISP that does not rely on SEACOM bandwidth to get you through the outage.

  • http://www.telescopesa.za.org Paul Dogon

    What moron put all our bandwidth into one obviously faulty system, and why the hell is there no backup?
    Its hard enough in these financial times to keep ones head above water, but if you are an internet business, this is a major disaster.

    Thanx to whatever fatcat is responsible for this F/Up I hope your Beemer blows up

  • Kerry

    Thanks Ian for a practical suggestion! Now for those of those not in the know. which ISPs don’t rely on Seacom?

  • http://www.nationalpositions.co.za Richard

    Vodacom HSDPA seems to be working well for overseas sites / downloads etc – MWEB is up and down on international bandwidth

  • Greg

    It seems that Mweb have their backup route over sat3 working – their cheap uncapped products are working okay, (p2p at a degraded rate, browsing fullspeed), and the Mweb business uncapped we have at work has been totally unaffected by the whole seacom outage.

    If Mweb can provide redundancy like this with the rip-off sat3 cable as a backup, once some real cables land, I think these types of outages should be a think of the past.

  • Fred

    Kerry, look into a second (backup) account with DataPro. it serves me well ….

  • http://www.thinkingoutloud.co.za Garth Michel

    What irritates me is it’s the users that are lumped with the responsibility of making sure they have a backup. Surely the ISP’s are the one that should have the back up routes.

  • Kepha Atika

    Murphy’s law “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”.

  • gatvol

    MWEB has been having problems for the last couple of months!!!! I am really gatvol as Mweb claims it is telkom and telkom says mweb….. now I see wots going on! I think im changing to iburst ! screw the stupid cables – maybe the satellites will work better??? Oh and since MWeb has this new uncapped internet – my INTERNET IS SUPER SLOW ! wot is better fast internet or uncapped internet? It is a joke! I cannot even download simple software updates for iphone or safari and it throws me out!!!

  • adwance machine

    Down time is expected but 6-8 ? thats just nuts

  • http://www.neuromance.co.za halicon

    it seems cheap bandwidth comes at a price after all :P

    get contingencies folks… and stop whining.

  • Starstreak

    MWEB seems to have recruited a bunch of folks to say “Stop blaming Mweb”, using the same viral way they did with the ‘Free The Web’ campaign .

    The fact is that we pay MWEB every month without any hiccups, yet the service goes down on a regular basis, sometimes for days. There was a time when it was down almost every Friday. Contingencies cost money and Mweb is not in the business of refunds or credits.

    The internet was designed with redundancy in mind and MWEB should have thought of this scenario.

  • Jacques

    MWeb is a bunch of idiots. The support is an absolute nightmare and like everything in the corporate world…you just a number. I took all my business away from MWeb and finally I can do business and get technical support quick & Fast. Mweb is probably the kakkest ISP in the world and support staff that shouldn’t even switch on a TV…nevermind a PC!!

  • *J*

    As I understand it one section ( red sea) has not been completed, how can you ‘provide’ a service from a product not yet fully operational? There is understanding that systems can fail and problems arise, but this differs from contingency plans ‘back firing’.

  • Kevin Naidoo

    I don’t care about mechanical issues and whatever , their should be backup systems in place to divert traffic or something because Telkom and my ISP are still charging me for my line and bandwidth for this period. Why must i pay for service that’s defected ?

Why TechCentral?

We know that as a prospective advertiser, you are spoilt for choice. Our job is to demonstrate why TechCentral delivers the best return for your advertising spend.

TechCentral is South Africa’s online technology news leader. We don’t say that lightly. We believe we produce the country’s best and most insightful online tech news aimed at industry professionals and those interested in the fast-changing world of technology.

We provide news, reviews and comment, without fear or favour, that is of direct relevance to our fast-expanding audience. Proportionately, we provide the largest local audience of all technology-focused online publishers.

We do not constantly regurgitate press releases to draw in search engine traffic — we believe websites that do so are doing their readers and advertisers a disservice. Nor do we sell “editorial features”, offer advertising “press offices” or rely on online bulletin-board forums of questionable value to advertisers to bolster our traffic.

TechCentral, which is edited and written by award-winning South African journalists, cares about delivering top-quality content to draw in the business and consumer readers that are of most interest to technology advertisers.

We’d like the opportunity to demonstrate the value of directing a portion of your advertising budget to TechCentral, whether your company is in the technology field or not. Numerous opportunities exist for companies interested in reaching our audience of key decision-makers in South Africa’s dynamic information and communications technology sector. We offer packages that will deliver among the best returns on investment available in the online technology news space.

For more information about advertising opportunities, and how your organisation can benefit by publicising itself on TechCentral, please call us on 011-792-0449 during office hours. Or send us an e-mail and ask for our latest rate card and brochure.