ADSL international connectivity problems (29 June 2012)

[inferno]

I'm also leaving Afrihost now.

[WAJeff]

As Justin mentioned in this thread earlier, we may have an earlier resolution - ie tonight.
Will keep everyone updated as things go along

[Roman4604]

Interestingly it looks like this is marked as a SAT-3 not a Seacom problem and I thought most of the non-Telkom traffic is using Seacom with SAT as redundancy.

Kinda easy to figure that one out ... the upstream provider needed to failover a large amount of their priority business traffic from SAT3 to Seacom, which obviously takes precedence over (re-sold) broadband.

[NotAFrog]

Latest update from Afrihost website:

Update:
A fault was identified on European Indian Gateway (EIG) cable system off the coast of Portugal.
This has affected the SAT3 cable which has failed SAT3 traffic to SEACOM.
Seacom is at capacity at the moment and that’s why our ADSL is slow at the moment
Initial resolution time was Sunday but new developments indicate it may be resolved as early as 18h00 tonight

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Thank you for your patience this far.

[mrlgm007]

Dear IS Client

Upstream Service Provider maintenance.

AFFECTED SERVICE: International Access, ADSL & MPLS VPN
LOCATION: International traffic between SA and London
START DATE: on Tue 3 Jul 2012
END DATE: on Thu 5 Jul 2012
EXPECTED DURATION: Risk of intermittent periods of increased latency, packet loss or loss of connectivity
IMPACT: Risk of intermittent increased latency, packet loss or loss of connectivity
REASON FOR CHANGE: Telkom advise of further Upstream Service Provider maintenance on the undersea cable system
IS REFERENCE: As per Telkom notice

click Here to add this event to your calendar

ADDITIONAL INFO:
Telkom have advised of further Upstream Service Provider maintenance on the undersea cable system between Portugal and the UK.
IS network engineering teams will closely monitor services during this period. Unfortunately no specific times have been provided of when activities might impact services.
All maintenance work is expected to be completed on 5 July.

[MickeyD]

Kinda easy to figure that one out ... the upstream provider needed to failover a large amount of priority business traffic from SAT3 to Seacom, which obviously takes precedence over (re-sold) broadband.

This is why I asked where the fault is... if it is after the SAT-3 handover point at Sesimbra then who is responsible?

The maintenance notice has been around for some time, so everyone should have been prepared for that.

[Pixual]

I got an sms from Afrihost.

I got one to tell me I was capped. So I bought a R29 top up and now I feel like my pants are down and I'm taking one for the team. Without any lube.

[T3rminator]

Latest update from Afrihost website:

Update:
A fault was identified on European Indian Gateway (EIG) cable system off the coast of Portugal.
This has affected the SAT3 cable which has failed SAT3 traffic to SEACOM.
Seacom is at capacity at the moment and that’s why our ADSL is slow at the moment
Initial resolution time was Sunday but new developments indicate it may be resolved as early as 18h00 tonight

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.
Thank you for your patience this far.

So Afrihost does not have enough DR bandwidth available to fail to SEACOM. They could have mentioned it earlier. Very disappointing.

[T3rminator]

Press release from Afrihost:

All our ADSL clients have been experiencing limited or no international Internet access since this morning. We apologise for the inconvenience and frustration caused, we understand this has impacted our clients in many ways.

Between 3am and 4am this morning, Telkom's SAT 3 cable went down, due to a physical fault on the submarine cable.

Afrihost’s network runs over both the SAT 3 and SEACOM cables, and when the SAT 3 cable failed, all traffic was routed via SEACOM. All affected ISP’s are now competing for ADSL and Hosting traffic on the SEACOM cable, which has reached capacity, rendering international service intermittent or non-existent.

We are assured that the cable repair is already underway. Although initial indications were that the repair would be completed within 1 or 2 days, recently received information indicates that the issue could be resolved by 6pm this evening.

We will be monitoring the repairs and traffic over the network closely to ensure that we can offer the maximum international connectivity until then.

We are truly sorry this happened, and even though this has been out of our control to a large entent, we’d like to assure our clients that we’ve committed every available resource to ensuring that they get maximum connectivity during this time.

Source

I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.

[werny]

My internet is perfect on Afrihost Uncapped, downloading at full speed and ping is 270ms to England, as normal.

[moklet]

Press release from Afrihost:



Source

I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.

Afrihost/IS capacity is. They probably only have a little capacity on seacom which is now exhausted. To provision extra capacity takes time. seacom has enough spare, but if you don't buy it it won't be available to you and if you only buy now it takes time to take effect

[T3rminator]

Afrihost/IS capacity is. They probably only have a little capacity on seacom which is now exhausted. To provision extra capacity takes time. seacom has enough spare, but if you don't buy it it won't be available to you and if you only buy now it takes time to take effect

It is truly strange why they would have so little capacity on SEACOM. Yes I understand how it works, it is just bad that it had to fail like this. I would expect it the other way arround. But in any case. I am going to try and do the old turn-it-off-and-on-again routine. Seeing as the above poster said his is working fine.

[Saajid]

I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.

I think they mean that whatever capacity they have purchased, is fully utilised. That is the lit capacity they are referring to. In order to increase their lit capacity, they need to purchase more from SEACOM, which involves securing finance, long term agreements, lighting up new fibres and/or wavelengths, etc. Not something that happens overnight. There is still plenty of unlit capacity on SEACOM. Last I heard only 60% of SEACOMs design capacity was lit.

SEACOM itself has a maximum design capacity of 1.3tbps using 10gbps fibre-optic technology, and they plan to improve on this by using the newer 40gbps fibre-optic technology to increase max design capacity to 2.6Tbps. This involves a hardware upgrade - the cable itself stays in place. Just the repeaters and switching technology need to be upgraded (in my limited knowledge of fibre-optic technologies)

[WAJeff]

Additional capacity for our fail-over international links have been brought online, so improved international experiences should be improved. Let us know
The repair ship is still en route, unfortunately a fix won't be able to be implemented tonight, hopefully tomorrow!

[HavocXphere]

meh. Kinda patchy on AH right now. WA is OK...but I'm out of cap.

In other news, SEACOM engineers have decided to throw a celebratory party that it is not, in fact, SEACOM that is down this time...

Haha. Sad but true.

agree

Thanks for SMS Afrihost. Excellent service.

meh. SMSs don't help me - I want interwebs.

The lack of an AfriHost rep in this thread is disappointing.

Maybe they can't access MyBB. *badum bum tish*