Seacom, whose East Coast cable will follow a similar route to Europe, is monitoring Wednesday`s break in a Mediterranean undersea cable that severely affected Internet access in large parts of the Middle East and South Asia.
Overseas media reports indicate the cable, which is operated by Telecom Egypt, broke two days ago. This left the North African country with only 40% of its Internet capacity today, although this is expected to improve to about 70% by tomorrow. However, it is still unclear whether one or two cables experienced a break and what was the cause.
Brendan Doyle, CEO of Seacom investor convergence partners, says the Seacom cable will follow an overland route once it lands on the Egyptian Red Sea coast. It will then have access to two fibre pairs in a new undersea cable that will stretch from Egypt to the French port of Marseilles.
This will equate to about 50% of Seacom`s planned 1.2Tb for its cable that will stretch from Durban up the East African coast.
"Alcatel has been awarded the contract to lay the Mediterranean portion by Telecom Egypt and it will be known as TE North," he says.
Doyle says an incident such as this illustrates why redundancy is so important and the company will watch to see how quickly the line is restored.
"Cables are built in segments, so it should be quite quick to locate and repair the fault."
According to Doyle, Seacom has already begun its own redundancy planning, which includes the use of satellites and the possibility of diverting traffic through a new West Coast cable, whenever that is built.
Reuters reports that the Mediterranean undersea cable break severely affected Egyptian financial markets. Countries as far away as India were also hit by the disruption.
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