Undersea cable operator Seacom has confirmed it has experienced a break in its East African connection, north of the Kenyan port of Mombassa, and that it may take several days to fix.
Late yesterday, the privately-operated cable company sent out a statement saying investigations indicated that a repeater has failed on segment 9 of the Seacom cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombassa. This failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected.
This is the second undersea cable break in as little as two weeks, after Telkom's SA Far East cable experienced a power outage in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This was repaired in 24 hours.
Seacom says it has initiated emergency repair procedures to replace the repeater and it has been in contact with Tyco, the firm that laid the cable more than a year ago.
“Once mobilised, the repair ship is deployed to the location of the fault to pick up the cable. The cable is then brought on board to undergo the repair - the faulty element is replaced with a new repeater - before being put back in the water,” the Seacom statement says.
A Seacom spokesperson told ITWeb that redundancy measures or alternative routes to get international bandwidth were the responsibility of the Internet service providers and that they should have plans in place.
“However, we will actively work with our clients to find alternative routes,” he says.
Seacom's statement says that, while the repair process itself will only take a few hours, the overall process may last a minimum of six to eight days. The actual duration is unpredictable, due to external factors such as transit time of the ship, weather conditions and time to locate the cable. For this reason, the estimated duration of this repair remains uncertain.
Andrew Alston, chief technology officer for Tenet - the academic network that is one of Seacom's biggest and first clients - says: “We are concerned about the break, because if Seacom goes down, Tenet goes down. However, this is only the second Seacom break that has occurred since they first began operations and we just have to roll with the punches.”
Alston says the majority of breaks that Tenet has experienced have been on the backhaul, or national network, which has nothing to do with Seacom.
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