South African Internet users can expect at least a week of disruptions as Pan-African ICT enabler Seacom experiences network problems.
Seacom experienced a service outage between Abu Talat (Egypt) and Marseilles (France), late on Saturday morning.
The company does not yet have the exact details of what caused the outage, as information but confirms that initial estimates indicated a total repair time of 12 days, depending on weather conditions.
The timeframe of fixing the technical hitch entails the acquisition of the necessary permits, as well as actual repair time, says Seacom. A repair vessel has been notified of the callout and mobilisation will occur immediately once permits are received.
The outage initially affected all Seacom traffic to Europe, although Seacom was able to restore some services by Saturday afternoon.
Seacom says restoration work continued throughout the weekend, in cooperation with Seacom's customers and partners, It will continue to actively work on securing additional capacity for all necessary services over the next day or two.
Completed in July 2009, Seacom connects SA, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia. The network also experienced downtime in July and December 2010. In these instances, access to local sites and services was not affected, but ISPs struggled to maintain international connectivity.
Andrew Alston, CTO for Tertiary Education and Research Network of SA, confirmed Seacom “went down” on Saturday. He says, however, that the network is managing to function, thanks to its extensive bandwidth solution that was put in place subsequent to Seacom's connection break last year.
“We expect that there may be slight saturation in traffic due to the downtime, but don't expect a huge performance impact.”
He says stakeholders were informed that the gaining of a permit will take Seacom about a week. This is reportedly due to the location of the fault. “We are bargaining on about 10 days of downtime.”
Seacom will keep the public informed of any developments or progress regarding the outage.
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