Local Internet service providers (ISPs) are battling to keep their customers up and running after Seacom went down on Monday, and are spending heavily to plug into different pipes.
Seacom's undersea cable gave up the ghost when a repeater failed between Mumbai and Mombasa, at the deepest point along its route.
A cable ship has been dispatched to the site, but it will have to locate and lift the cable using robotics, replace or repair the repeater, and then drop the cable again. This process could take between six and eight days, according to Seacom, but as weather conditions are a factor, the company cannot be completely certain that it will not take longer.
While access to local sites and services is not affected, ISPs are battling to maintain International connectivity. Some are doing so by reverting to Telkom's cable, SAT-3, which comes at a cost.
“Unfortunately, this is only possible where additional bandwidth is available,” says Sean Nourse, executive of connectivity at Internet Solutions (IS). “We are uncertain at this stage as to the financial impact this is having on IS and will only understand the full effect once the outage has been resolved.”
Afrihost, another ISP, is routing client connections through a proxy server that can offer international access via its hosting environment on SAT-3. “I won't give numbers, but it is costing us every day Seacom is down,” says sales director Greg Payne.
XHead = No fail-over
Seacom announced on Wednesday it has secured reroute alternatives for its clients in the interim. However, some ISPs have chosen not to make use of the offer.
“Seacom's alternative has been going up and down. We went over for a while, but changed back. We will go back when it stabilises,” said Payne on Thursday.
MWeb CEO Derek Hershaw says even though Telkom's SAT-3 cable ensured some redundancy, which is being used primarily for e-mail, MWeb has been in discussions to secure additional capacity. According to Hershaw, the company has managed to connect about 30% of its ADSL customers through the SAIX wholesale network.
However, Telkom's World Cup commitments prevent it from providing more connectivity through the network. Hershaw says: “Other negotiations have resulted in access to an alternative international cable,” but as of yet, he has provided no details as to which cable this might be.
Tenet - the Tertiary Education and Research Network of SA - Seacom's first and possibly largest customer, through unknown technical reasons has managed to retain some uptime, and is willing to help out where it can.
“During this crisis period, Tenet has made, and will continue to make, capacity available to other Seacom customers with which Tenet has adequately sized interconnections. This is being done with Seacom's permission. In these circumstances, there are of course no guarantees as to the availability of this capacity,” said a statement from Tenet.
While ISPs that use SAT-3 as their primary line, such as Africa INX, are singing the older cable's praises, calling it more reliable, Steven Ambrose, MD of WWW Strategy, says Seacom and SAT-3 are actually different services.
“The one thing that everyone's forgotten is that Seacom never offered redundancy and was clear about that from the beginning,” says Ambrose.
The benefit of Seacom is that the pipe is big and the costs are low, but it is so cheap because there is no fail-over. SAT-3, according to Ambrose, also goes down - all cables have the potential to go down - but when SAT-3 has problems, traffic gets rerouted through the South Africa Far East cable. It's a trade-off, because this service costs ISPs more.
More than pointing out problems with Seacom, Ambrose believes this incident indicates how important the other two cables that are due to land here really are.
“As more and more cables come, we will build more and more redundancy,” he says.
Independent analyst Richard Hurst echoes the sentiment. “I don't think it's a flaw in Seacom, because other cables have also gone down before. I think it indicates the importance of Seacom, because, as soon as that bandwidth became available it was filled up. It highlights our reliance on Seacom and indicates the need for redundancy.”
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