Telkom blames 'bad luck` for loss of services

By Rodney Weidemann for Telkom

Johannesburg, 17 Jun 2005

A combination of bad timing and bad luck led to the loss of two of Telkom`s international cable routes for two hours on Wednesday afternoon, says the fixed-line operator.

Xolisa Vapi, Telkom media relations specialist, says a construction vehicle damaged one of the company`s overhead optic fibre cables near the town of Hluhluwe in northern KwaZulu-Natal.

Vapi says that under normal circumstances customers would not have been affected, as there would have been an instant rerouting of services over a diverse alternate route, but in this instance, the cable break occurred as planned maintenance work was under way to increase bandwidth capacity on the national transport network.

Because of this, there was a simultaneous network outage which affected certain international private leased circuit services working over the SAT-2 and SAT-3 (South Africa Trans Atlantic) and SAFE (South Africa Far East) cable routes.

"However, satellite connectivity was available throughout the outage and voice communications were largely unaffected," says Bashier Sallie, managing executive, network service management.

"The simultaneous outage did, however, present a capacity challenge in terms of the amount of international private leased circuits that required routing over satellite connectivity, which consequently affected a wide range of Telkom customers using international data connectivity."

He says that while no traffic should have been affected during the upgrade, a section of the alternate route carrying traffic terminating on Telkom`s international switches in Johannesburg failed when the construction vehicle damaged an optic fibre cable.

Sallie says cable network maintenance staff worked swiftly to identify the exact location of the failure and replaced 100m of fibre optic cable, the entire episode lasting just over two hours, from first detection to completion.

While it was reported on Highveld Stereo that the Johannesburg Stock Exchange had been forced to stop trading during this time, Telkom`s spokesman would not be drawn on the issue, stating that Telkom could not comment on what the JSE did.

Sallie claims Telkom has commenced an investigation to establish if the company that caused the damage to the fibre optic cable had appropriate permission to do work in the vicinity of the Telkom plant.

"Construction work in the vicinity of all major utilities, including telecommunications facilities, should always be accompanied by right of way to work in these areas, and if right of way had been obtained, Telkom will try to establish if the damage was done negligently."