When Seacom went down from 6 to 23 July, Internet service providers (ISPs) relying on the cable had to make alternative arrangements - at a cost.
Seacom stipulates in its contract with service providers that it will not provide fail-over. However, the un-guaranteed Seacom line is cheaper than SAT-3's guaranteed solution, which provides automatic redundancy on its SAFE line.
ISPs which had redundancy, such as MTN Business, did not feel the effects of Seacom's downtime. MTN GM of technology and infrastructure, Edwin Thomson, says MTN Business customers were not even aware of the problems on Seacom, since their service automatically moved over onto SAT-3.
“It's a myth that having capacity on SAT-3 is more expensive than Seacom,” he says. “It depends on how you build your capacity. There are some products on SAT-3 that compete with Seacom. It's a case of not keeping all your eggs in one basket.”
For others, however, the outage forced them to negotiate short-term solutions.
MWeb CEO Derek Hershaw explains: “When an ISP buys bandwidth, the longer the term one commits to, the cheaper the rate will be. MWeb bought bandwidth for a couple of weeks, and it would naturally make it the most expensive option given the timeframe we required it for.”
Amid rumours that ISPs were taken advantage of, Hershaw says: “It's important to keep the context of the situation in mind. It's also public knowledge that SAT-3 pricing from Telkom is more expensive compared to Seacom pricing, so we were aware that we would pay a premium for this bandwidth compared to what we would normally pay for the same bandwidth from Seacom. Satisfying our customers by dealing with the Seacom failure in the best way we could was our biggest priority.”
Another ISP, which wishes to remain nameless, says: “Seacom going down has made significant impact to our clients and our business. Our clients were not able to use the Internet due to the outage and hence our revenues were directly impacted. Working in a low margin, high volume business means that these outages affect your bottom line directly. Unfortunately, it is near to impossible to recover that revenue in the month
of an outage, and the revenue is lost for good.”
Independent analyst Richard Hurst says the Seacom crisis serves to show how important it is to have multiple cables operating in SA.
“It highlights our reliance on Seacom and indicates the need for redundancy.”
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