SEACOM fault may take two more weeks to fix

Rudolph Muller

Rudolph Muller is the editor at MyBroadband and covers telecoms and broadband news. Rudolph comes from an academic background, but left the University of...

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The SEACOM outage which started on Monday morning continues to disrupt Internet services in South Africa.  While many service providers like MWEB have found interim solutions only a full restoration of SEACOM will provide a true solution to the current international bandwidth woes.

On Monday SEACOM indicated that the overall fault restoration process may last a minimum of 6-8 days which means that the cable could have been online early next week.  This estimate has however now been revised.

SEACOM today said that it has continued to work closely with its partners to deploy the best plan possible for the repair operations.  “As communicated earlier, the exogenous factors such as location, water depth, weather and spare parts needed make this cable outage very difficult to repair and a highly specialised vessel and technical crew is being used to carry out this work,” SEACOM said in a press statement.
 
Based on this, the current timeline indicates that the repairs may now only be finalised by 22 July 2010.
 
“The deployment of restored capacity via other cable systems has progressed very well and SEACOM is pleased with the positive support received from clients and suppliers alike. In addition to the alternative capacity already in place, SEACOM will also continue to source and activate additional capacity to meet customer requirements for the duration of the repairs,” SEACOM concluded.

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