The latest failure of the Seacom submarine cable has once again brought several large ISPs to a grinding halt. This is due to several larger ISPs opting for Seacom as a more economical route to the WWW, than current more stable systems like SAT3.
Africa INX, a wholesale provider of international MPLS and Internet services, believes the introduction of more submarine cables will reduce the effects of breaks in single cable systems like Seacom.
Stuart Hardy, MD of Africa INX, says: “Most of the larger providers in the market have split their international capacity to some degree between SAT3 and Seacom. Therefore, the effect to their networks when one of these circuits fail is a serious degradation of service, due to only 50% of the capacity being left to service clients on the remaining cable.
“Companies who have selected most of their capacity to run Seacom have been even more exposed than this. When Eassy and WACS is introduced, I expect to some degree that these operators will spread their purchases and to some degree their risk across more international cables, reducing the impact of a single cable break to the entire network”
When Seacom was introduced into the market, most operators took the opportunity of purchasing long-term capacity on the cable because of the favourable rates offered. It was assumed that the cable would deliver similar stability and quality as older cables such as SAT3, which has proven to not be the case.
“Africa INX has to some degree been criticised for selecting to use SAT 3 as its primary international path, mainly due to the fact that SAT 3 remains priced at a premium to new cables like Seacom. Ironically, our late entry into the market allowed us to take a view, not only the costs related to the options available, but also the service levels provided by both cables over the last two years. It seems reasonable to pay a bit more for a service that has delivered consistently over the last 10 years, than a cheaper one that suffers from more cable failures. Of course, our primary path is SAT 3, and our restoration path is Seacom, so if SAT 3 suffered a similar failure to Seacom, we would be in the same boat as everyone else,” says Hardy.
Hardy also believes that operators have real challenges when trying to select international cable services, not only because of cost and reliability.
“Even when new cables become available, it's a trade-off for operators in selecting additional routes. The trade-off is the loss of efficiency and network design simplicity, as you are now trying to use several paths to get to international destinations or the WWW. When you have one path, it's easy, and because there is no bandwidth waste, it's efficient and cost-effective. Every additional path you add creates complexity, which is a downside to spreading your risk on several cables. Africa INX has only one primary path, which gives us the efficiency that we need, and one restoration path, which is effected only in failure, Seacom. This works well for us now, but when we get to larger bandwidth values like STM16, this model will no longer be practical and we will also have to start balancing bandwidth on more than one cable,” ends Hardy.
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