The damage to the Seacom lines in late March caused slowdowns and connectivity issues for South Africans en masse. In restoring connection, vendor-neutral data centre colocation services allowed for the timeous reconnection of major industry players, according to Lex van Wyk, Teraco Data Environments CEO.
"With Seacom located close to their clients in the data centre, we were easily able to connect them to a different Seacom routing environment to give them additional capacity," says Van Wyk.
The benefits of this neutrality were evident in the Teraco facilities' swift re-establishing of access for MTN, Cell C and other large telecommunications companies, says Van Wyk.
Vendor neutrality ensures that the best possible hardware and software solutions are adoptable, freeing data centres from commitments to specific product lines or developers, says Teraco. This allows for data centres to cater to companies that might otherwise have employed exclusive data centre service solutions.
Teraco maintains active connections to several of the world's leading Internet service providers, allowing local routing for their traffic, which comes across SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, Eassy and WACS.
A second Seacom break, which occurred off the Egyptian coastline, is thought to have been caused by "external aggression" - most likely an anchor being dragged across the seabed by a large vessel, says Seacom CEO Mark Simpson.
This is the most common cause of such incidents, says Simpson, despite warnings and information about exclusion zones given to ships, as well as armouring and burying the cables themselves. He does not believe sabotage is the cause, despite the Egyptian armed forces capturing divers cutting cables.
While repairing the connection, alternate routes had to be identified, negotiated and signed into effect by Seacom, in order to ensure multiple Mediterranean paths remained unaffected by the cable damage.
"The benefits of being in a neutral data centre like Teraco and close to our clients means that no last mile replacement is required in the event of an outage," says Claes Segelberg, CTO of Seacom. "We've also been able to work with partners like Teraco to swiftly identify solutions to give our clients additional capacity in situations like we've faced over the past couple of days."
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