MWeb beefs up capacity

MWeb has landed SAT-3 cable capacity in its Cape Town node, after the Internet service provider (ISP) was affected by Seacom's downtime in July and announced that it would source additional capacity.

It says this forms part of its ongoing bandwidth capacity upgrades and brings a degree of resilience to its network.

The SAT-3 undersea fibre-optic cable runs up the west coast of Africa, to Portugal, according to MWeb.

“With international capacity on both the west and east coast of Africa, our exposure to downtime on any single cable is significantly reduced. We will also be bringing international capacity directly into our data centre in Cape Town, which will improve the overall experience for our ADSL customers connecting to our Cape Town IPC node,” says CEO Derek Hershaw.

However, the company says although MWeb will buy the capacity on SAT-3, the service will be managed by Seacom.

This allows MWeb to have one point of contact through a single service provider. Hershaw explains that MWeb has made this decision due to its strong working relationship with Seacom.

Seacom experienced downtime in December and July last year.

Local ISPs battled to keep their customers up and running when the cable went down in July, and spent heavily to plug into different pipes.

While access to local sites and services were not affected, ISPs struggled to maintain international connectivity. Some did so by reverting to Telkom's cable, SAT-3, which came at a high cost.

Hershaw said even though Telkom's SAT-3 cable, which was being used primarily for e-mail, ensured some redundancy, MWeb had been in discussions to secure additional capacity.

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, MD of WWW Strategy Steven Ambrose 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 SA-Far East cable. It's a trade-off, because this service costs ISPs more.

“As more and more cables come, we will build more and more redundancy,” adds Ambrose.