Sign up with GoogleOne unique implication of this is that we won't be able to utilize one of our contingencies if the testing of the upgrades gives us a negative result for the duration of the Seacom maintenance - however this will hopefully not prove necessary.
We saw the statement and unfortunately it lends itself to being read as a bit of FUD, although we have no reason to presume that to be the intention of the author. The short answer is that no we don't expect it to influence us because Seacom is not our primary transit cable.
The longer answer of course has a few parts: Firstly our traffic is ordinarily carried on the WACS cable, not Seacom - and while we currently are experiencing a constraint on international capacity the capacity increases are on track and are not affected by this at all. Secondly providers frequently co-operate with each other in order to shoulder the risk of a cable failing with the result that a commercial agreement may be in place that will see certain traffic that would have been transmitted on Seacom by a different provider being carried as part of the pool which our traffic forms part of: If this does occur then the implication is simply that the network is more heavily utilized, BUT the scheduled maintenance is at an off-peak time and we don't anticipate this to be a problem. Thirdly problems with international connectivity on any sizeable number of ADSL subscribers is going to result in an increase of traffic on the ADSL infrastructure (with packets being lost and resent) - so you may find the exchange infrastructure under a little more strain. Fourthly subscribers who utilize an adversely affected provider who have backup accounts with a provider in our pool are going to use their backup accounts and thereby increase the demand.
We have asked our upstream providers to keep us appraised if there is any developments to report and beyond what I've put forward we do not have any reason to foresee a problem - but both Shaun and I will be awake around the time the maintenance kicks off and we will monitor the situation.
Ultimately problems on the Internet may, by the very nature of network effects, have implications for users that are unforeseen and negligible (had a look the other day and some of the performance problems to US based webservers - whilst others were performing better - to realize that it was the 4th of July in yankland).
That's the nature of the Wibbly Wobbly Web. It wibbles, it wobbles, and it is the web! 
