SAT-3 international ADSL outage explained (June 2012)

Ah sometimes I miss the ISP industry & WA. Still remains one of the most exciting, interesting and educational businesses out there.
 
I'd love to know why, when I was on an account that uses Seacom, my net was also dead slow?
 
Looking back the cable repair ship was indeed on-site suspiciously fast. I must admit I didn't pick up on that though. Hindsight is 20/20 indeed.
 
bekdik said:
Maybe all the SAT3 traffic was rerouted via seacom?
Click to expand...

Yes, but it was a case of ISP's having no idea what happened and not having sufficient redundancy that resulted in a bit of a mess for some of them.

Bryant said that over the last few years the networks of local ISPs have become increasingly resilient to single system failures with the landing of cables such as EASSy and Seacom.
Click to expand...

What happened here is NOT an example of "increasing resiliency". But grated communication played a roll.

With WACS currently getting deployed that trend is set to increase
Click to expand...

The same things were said with Seacom and look how that turned out. I dearly hope this is the case, maybe 4 is the lucky number for redundant cables.

On a side note, considering ISPs are locked in a battle to reduce prices, have some of them not skimped on redundancy capacity?
 
Local bandwidth usage probably overloaded the network.. ie. all the new uncapped accounts out there ;)
 
lol if an ISP has 1Gb/sec on Seacom and 1Gb/sec on SAT3, and they average 1.5Gb/sec, and SAT-3 goes down, what do you think will happen? :p

I don't think is realistic to have full n+1 redundancy on international links that are provided on a best-efforts basis... Else we'd be paying a lot more for our uncapped accounts.
 
Mouse said:
And Telkom still calls their network "world class" :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Well I find it interesting that my Afrihost and Webafrica bandwidth was practically dead for the first few hours. On the other hand, my Telkom bandwidth is what I switched over to, as that was doing generally fine.

I must admit, and I agree with others asking, how come companies using a large Seacom portion were effected so heavily?
 
Imaginet is still throttling the life out of us during the day with international sites being rendered useless. Banks, Gmail and email traffic coming through fine.

After 17:00 everything works fine again.
 
Last edited:
BLIXEMPIE said:
"Emergency" planned maintenance?
Click to expand...

Probably the same as having to buy a morning after pill, after realising that you were so drunk that the rubber was somehow worn on your head as a swimming cap, instead of being worn as a diving suit on your "head". Act all cool, like it happens all the time, but inside you are screaming "oh gawd what have I done?!"
 
Flidiot said:
Probably the same as having to buy a morning after pill, after realising that you were so drunk that the rubber was somehow worn on your head as a swimming cap, instead of being worn as a diving suit on your "head". Act all cool, like it happens all the time, but inside you are screaming "oh gawd what have I done?!"
Click to expand...

ROFL...awesome comment
 
Cybersmart [email protected]
12:35 (4 hours ago)

to me
Dear Cybersmart Customer

We have been advised by our upstream providers that emergency maintenance will be performed on our International lines as per the schedule below. We expect international connectivity to be diminished during these periods.

Planned Maintenance Schedule:

SAT3:
05/07/2012 2 - 4 hours (specific time not indicated)

Seacom:
04/07/2012 22:00 - 04:00 (6 hours)
05/07/2012 17:00 - 21:00 (4 hours)

Further updates and changes will be available on http://faq.cybersmart.co.za


Sincerely,
Cybersmart Team
Click to expand...

I hope that maintenance on the two cables is not carried out at the same time as it would be really daft...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter