[Phillip de Wet] An estimated 160 000 users lost their Internet connections on Wednesday when a fibre optic cable was accidentally cut.
Telkom contractors apparently caused the break in the line between The Internet Solution (IS) facility in Rosebank and the Telkom Rosebank exchange. IS says users in Port Elizabeth, Rosebank and Durban, and shared access customers in Cape Town were affected.
"Our high speed users, the critical lines, were not affected," says IS infrastructure MD Derek Wilcocks. "None of our banking and insurance customers experienced outages." Peer connections were also not affected, and international bandwidth was not seriously compromised.
IS says about 1 600 lines were affected by the two-hour outage, and the company has an estimated average of 100 users per line.
"If this happened in a week and a half there would have been no problem," Wilcocks says. Telkom is expected to complete redundant infrastructure by the end of the month. A similar outage occurred in the same area in January 1998, and IS says it had ordered a redundant fibre ring from Telkom nine months before that. That ring should be completed and connected soon.
"IS is currently investing heavily to ensure no single point of failure in our services, national or international network, and we will shortly be in a position to pass this on to our customers in the form of service level agreements," Wilcocks concluded in a letter of apology to customers.
Mike Wright, MD of the E-mail Corporation and chairman of the Audit Bureau of Internet Standards says he never noticed the outage, as his company has a SAIX redundant line.
He says it is difficult to put a figure to the financial loss companies might have experienced because of the break. "It is hard to quantify how much damage was done, and maybe it only affected the small guys." Smaller companies would suffer less in rand and cent terms, he says.
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