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SEACOM outage and SA impact explained
| Staff Writer | March 17, 2011 | No comments |
Staff Writer
MyBroadband’s Staff Writer is directly plugged into the South African Internet backbone, and spits out press releases and other news as he receives it. ...
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SEACOM’s outage today caused by a cable break in Egypt; affects ADSL subscribers in different ways
SEACOM clients started reporting downtime on the SEACOM system shortly before 23:30 on 16 March, with initial indications pointing to a terrestrial cable break between Alexandria and Cairo as the cause of the outage. This section forms part of the SMW4 cable system which SEACOM uses.
According to network notices all traffic passing through SMW4 Seg-3 have been affected (because of a cable break just north of Cairo on the SE-ME-WE-4 leg of the SEACOM cable), which essentially means that SEACOM’s connectivity to Europe/London is affected.
The curfew in Egypt because of unrest in the region however means that repair workers could not respond until after the curfew was lifted this morning, and the ETR is around 4 hours from then, subject to favorable conditions in Cairo (Egypt).
The end result is that an optimistic estimate for services to be restored on SEACOM will be late this morning – given that everything goes as planned.
Many ADSL subscribers have reported a slowdown, or even outage in some cases, in international connectivity which is directly related to the SEACOM outage.
MWEB said that while standard connectivity is not disrupted (since they have full redundancy in place via SAT-3), all P2P traffic has been cut back because of the SEACOM cable break.
MWEB MD Derek Hershaw however said at just before 09:00 that they have been restored to 100% of their international capacity, and MWEB subscribers are therefore not impacted any longer.
While Cybersmart’s ‘restored’ customers are not affected by the SEACOM outage, their non-restored customers are left without international Internet access.
Internet Solutions’ clients, which include Afrihost and Openweb subscribers, have also reported slow international speeds. Internet Solutions merely said that said that there is a “Seacom fault on the terrestrial portion of the line in Egypt”, and that engineers are attending.
Official update from SEACOM at 10:07 on 17 March
“SEACOM experienced a fault on a partner network from 20:57 GMT on 16 March 2011. The fault has been repaired and all customers have been restored.”
SEACOM downtime << Comments and views
