Seacom says that the damage to its SMW-4 cable has yet to be determined, but it doubts that the outage was caused by sabotage.
The cable operator has recently suffered cuts to both its cables, with the latest happening yesterday morning when its SMW4 cable system suffered a cable cut off the coast of Egypt.
SMW4 is the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe four an optical fibre submarine communications cable system that carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.
Reuters reported that Egypt's coastguard caught three divers cutting through an undersea Internet cable on Wednesday. It noted that this was the first suggestion criminals might be involved in days of severed connections and disruptions online.
A patrol stopped a fishing boat near the Mediterranean port city of Alexandria and arrested three divers, Reuters quotes an army spokesman's post on his official Facebook page. He did not give details of the divers' possible motive in severing the link he said belonged to Egypt Telecom, the country's monopoly landline provider, the wire service said.
"The armed forces foiled an attempt and arrested three divers while they were cutting a submarine cable," he is quoted as saying.
Seacom says it has had many queries today on the back of the reports. It says that it is unlikely that the damage to the system was caused by sabotage. "The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event."
The final cause of the cable cut will be determined once the cable is repaired in the coming weeks and the damaged section is recovered from the seabed and inspected, says Seacom. It notes that the investigation is in its early stages and nothing is as yet confirmed in regard to the cause of the damage to SMW-4.
Seacom launched the first undersea fibre-optic cable to connect Southern and Eastern Africa with Europe and Asia, in July 2009. On Friday morning, it suffered a physical cable cut some kilometres north of the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea.
It has said,based on its experience with sub-sea systems and the nature of the sea area where the initial cut occurred, that "the most likely cause is external aggression to the cable, most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the seabed".
This is a common cause of damage to cable systems globally, despite continued efforts to protect the cable with armour, burying, notifications to ships of cable location and exclusion zones, CEO Mark Simpson has said.
Seacom continues to source further capacity to re-establish full restoration for all customers. "We again apologise to those customers who continue to be impacted following the further fault on the restoration system SMW4 yesterday morning."
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