ADSL international connectivity problems (29 June 2012)

Roman4604 said:
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.
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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.
 
NotAFrog said:
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.
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So Afrihost does not have enough DR bandwidth available to fail to SEACOM. They could have mentioned it earlier. Very disappointing.
 
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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.
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Source

I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.
 
My internet is perfect on Afrihost Uncapped, downloading at full speed and ping is 270ms to England, as normal.
 
T3rminator said:
Press release from Afrihost:



Source

I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.
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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
 
moklet said:
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
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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.
 
T3rminator said:
I find it difficult to believe that the entire SEACOM cable is "at capacity" due to everyone using it.
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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)
 
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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!
 
meh. Kinda patchy on AH right now. WA is OK...but I'm out of cap.

Icarium said:
In other news, SEACOM engineers have decided to throw a celebratory party that it is not, in fact, SEACOM that is down this time...
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Haha. Sad but true.

optel said:
agree

Thanks for SMS Afrihost. Excellent service.
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meh. SMSs don't help me - I want interwebs.

dequadin said:
The lack of an AfriHost rep in this thread is disappointing.
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Maybe they can't access MyBB. *badum bum tish*
 
Nothing is wrong with my Afrihost uncapped, cant understand why some people are having problems??
 
Afrihost to london:

2036117802.png


Openweb (unshaped yet I'm not going full speed) to london:

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2036120236.png
 
Besides FNB Connect, which other prepaid ISP is working? Specifically with diablo 3 in mind! :p
 
20KB/s YEA !! on 10mb line...you did a major improvement thanks Afrihost ... :mad: there goes my online studying tonight.... Thank You.
 
Will@MWEB said:
As it happens we do offer a 7 day trial account that you can sign up for with a quick call to our sales team :)
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Good point! Actually had completely forgotten that MWeb actually offers trials.

So, to rephrase my previous post - you guys should use these opportunities to promote the trial accounts :D
 
Slow international.. How about totally #@$@#$@#$ dead.... :(
Can't even play WOW on this.. Facebook as good as dead.. Youtube not a chance in hell.

Anyone for a round of monopoly come round to my house.. Bring beer..
 
Just received an update from our Network Team. We're running at 80% capacity at the moment, so a better online experience should be seen - however we can't guarantee anything at this stage yet.
As mentioned previously, ETR of a fix should be tomorrow. No further feedback is expected tonight.

Once we have feedback tomorrow we'll continue posting.
 
I'm confused. If Seacom goes down then IS is pig slow so one would think that most of their traffic is routed over Seacom however now that SAT3 is having issues IS is also pig slow. Which line are they using? It's pathetic that they have no failover. I feel sorry for ISPs using the IS backbone because they are at the mercy of a Tier 1 ISP that appears to have no BCP for ADSL. This however will not stop people from wanting to move to MWEB who appears to be the only Tier 1 that has a backup for ADSL.
 
my afrihost capped seems to have stabilized a bit


from the mybb speedtest

International, 4mb adsl.


Test conducted on Saturday, June 30, 2012 12:11:41 AM

Download Speed: 2668 kbps (333.5 KB/sec transfer rate)

Upload Speed: 373 kbps (46.6 KB/sec transfer rate)

Latency: 207 ms
 
Morning everyone,

No further updates, we're still running at 80% capacity as per my post last night. Things do seem to look better though with latency seeing better performance.
I've requested an updated from our upstream providers however nothing has come through just yet. We're waiting on an ETA on when the ship starts performing repairs as well as a better ETR on final repairs.

In the mean time, here's some interesting reading on how undersea cables are repaired :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable#Cable_repair
 
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