ADSL performance hit by SEACOM downtime

Rerouted my bum. Sitting here in Durban not being able to do anything. Oh wait I lie, I can watch youtube of all things. Nothing else seems to work. Even getting to the forums took ages |:
 
From information available, it seems that SMW-4, IMEWE, EIG and SEACOM are all currently down. (Meaning that EASSY is also down at the moment, NOT just SEACOM)

Now, this is really strange, because of those come out of a landing station 200 kilometers from the other 2.

The EIG cable cut is 18 kilometers off shore from my sources, and EIG was up yesterday. I was wondering about this, because considering the instability seen on SEACOM for the last few days I was wondering when this happened if they hadn't already been running on their own restoration capacity and then lost more cable systems.

It's pretty strange. Will be interesting to see what actually gets restored though and when.
 
Our IS 1:1 fibre service is almost unusable. Surprising to see some ADSL clients on their network getting better results than us at the moment. Seems a bit unfair considering the amount of money we're paying!

Fortunately we have a Neobroadband fibre service as backup - working perfectly.
 
daveza said:
One presumes it's quite deep there - just how does a cable lying on the bottom of the sea get cut ?
Click to expand...

Anchors and strong currents. Nautical charts usually indicate no-anchor zones arround cables but these are ignored in the 3rd world like most regulations.

Here is some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption#Cause_of_cable_breaks

In other news, TENET has been switched over to WACS and is running beautifully.

I have two questions though, does a loss in one of our cables result in stange behaviour in other parts of the network? And one more Q, what is the relationship between SEACOM and WACS? Why is it indicated as part of the "SEACOM Network", and if it is part, why is Seacom not flawlessly routing their clients over that cable?
 
T3rminator said:
Anchors and strong currents. Nautical charts usually indicate no-anchor zones arround cables but these are ignored in the 3rd world like most regulations.

Here is some more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption#Cause_of_cable_breaks

In other news, TENET has been switched over to WACS and is running beautifully.

I have two questions though, does a loss in one of our cables result in stange behaviour in other parts of the network? And one more Q, what is the relationship between SEACOM and WACS? Why is it indicated as part of the "SEACOM Network", and if it is part, why is Seacom not flawlessly routing their clients over that cable?
Click to expand...

Not quite sure what you mean with your first question, you'd need to be more specific though yes, the loss of a cable system can have an impact on other things dependant on how the routing is being done. On the second question, keep in mind that the TENET restoration is via Layer 3 and not via Layer 1/2. Restoring IP circuits and restoring SDH circuits/wavelengths is a VERY different process, the latter being far far more complex. That probably explains why circuits haven't been restored via WACS in the way you would expect, since the majority of SEACOM's in use capacity is via SDH point to point circuits, and these can't simply be re-routed like that.

Those that have point to point circuits on multiple cable systems can re-route the way that TENET did, however, then it becomes a matter of capacity, and I'm pretty sure *everyone* is running short right now (Keep in mind, Universities are on holiday at the moment for Easter, if the cable cuts last long enough till everyone comes back, you'd likely see saturation there as well, since the WACS capacity is not as large as the SEACOM capacity)
 
Wow thanks Andrew, some big words there but it makes sense now :)

What I meant by my first one is users from ISPs with redundant capacity etc are seeing connectivity issues but I can imagine that bandwidth runs low and simply "re-routing" is much more difficult than it sounds.
 
OMG im taking upto 5 minutes just load international pages
 
I am on MWEB and this morning I had issues but after a router restart most of my activity has been perfect however Skype cannot connect at all. International and local pages all load.

Cable breaks happen and are just a fact of life but they are still irritating.
 
downloading at 600 Bytes sure can get irritating indeed...
 
daveza said:
One presumes it's quite deep there - just how does a cable lying on the bottom of the sea get cut ?
Click to expand...

Our Department of Communications, who else.

its probably too deep for a ship's anchor @ 18KM offshore.
 
Can confirm our ADSL accounts both on IS and MTN have been affected by the outage.

Accounts are all still up and is usable however speeds have dropped but at least clients can still make use of their ADSL it's not completely dead.
 
This is a complete nightmare I have a deadline that needs to be sent to a client via a website that I can't currently access, and I can't mail them to let them know because all our comms happen on that site... UGH
 
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