A segment of the Seacom cable

Seacom, the undersea cable, may be offline until 22 July. A Seacom spokesman warned on Friday that repairs may only be finalised much later than initially thought because of various factors, including the depth under the ocean of fault.

Seacom went offline on Monday, cutting off broadband users whose service providers buy capacity on exclusively on the Seacom system. The service disruptions have hit MWeb, part of Naspers, and downstream service providers from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions particularly hard.

The cable operator had exected the fault to repaired in about a week. But now a company spokesman says “exogenous factors such as location, water depth, weather and spare parts have made this cable outage very difficult to repair and a highly specialised vessel and technical crew is being used to carry out this work”.

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Based on this, the current timeline indicates that the repairs may now only be finalised by 22 July,” the Seacom spokesman says.
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The deployment of restored capacity via other cable systems has progressed very well and Seacom is pleased with the positive support received from clients and suppliers alike.”

Seacom says alternative capacity in place and will continue to source and activate additional capacity to meet customer requirements for the duration of the repairs.

MWeb announced earlier on Friday that it had restored all of its international bandwidth and was running at full capacity. “We have secured full capacity split over two separate routes,” says MWeb executive Derek Hershaw.  — Staff reporter, TechCentral

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