SEACOM cable fault update

AfricanTech said:
I am constantly amazed at how people who have no idea of how difficult it is to fix or diagnose something deeply (excuse the pun) technical and immensely complicated moan and squeal. "Yah! you know, those blerry okes must just somma fix the blinkin interwebs - I paid my 20 bucks and I don't care that the break is 4.7 km deep in the middle of the bloody ocean...."

These are probably the same people who haven't fixed the creaky door or bust light bulb that their wives have been moaning about for a year.

aaaaarghh....and I promised myself I would not feed the trolls.
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`+1 Wish I could have said it as nicely as you :D
 
So I read somewhere else that they haveta cut the cable before bringing it up for repair else it will snap. So erm, how do they fix the cut afterwards?
Me thinks a documentary on this process would be kinda cool to watch.
 
Any one remember if at any time the SAT3 cable went down for a week due to a broken repeater?
 
They knew from the start that it was a faulty repeater. They should also know exactly where that repeater is, if they dont then the cable wasnt designed very well was it?
I just find it amazing that its taken so long to just get the ships underway for such a high profile problem.
 
Suppose they have to identify exactly what the problem is before knowing what ship to send?
 
Repairing a submarine cable is not an easy thing.
Thats why the cable systems are designed to a spec which allows for only 2 failures in the 25 year lifetime of a cable system.

Also, keep in mind that there are only a finite number of cable repair/maintenance ships in existence. And with the amount of cable builds going on around Africa at the moment, they probably had to pull a ship from another project just to do the repair.
 
daffy said:
Repairing a submarine cable is not an easy thing.
Thats why the cable systems are designed to a spec which allows for only 2 failures in the 25 year lifetime of a cable system.

Also, keep in mind that there are only a finite number of cable repair/maintenance ships in existence. And with the amount of cable builds going on around Africa at the moment, they probably had to pull a ship from another project just to do the repair.
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I think I read that there are three ships capable of doing the repair.

Two failures over 25 years? I think we've had those two already.
 
xrapidx said:
I think I read that there are three ships capable of doing the repair.

Two failures over 25 years? I think we've had those two already.
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So far, this is the first failure on the SEACOM cable itself.
The previous long outage was on SEA-ME-WE-4, which is temporarily being used to carry data until the final portion of SEACOM is completed.
And all the other outages, were a fault on the terrestrial network, which is Neotel.
 
daffy said:
So far, this is the first failure on the SEACOM cable itself.
The previous long outage was on SEA-ME-WE-4, which is temporarily being used to carry data until the final portion of SEACOM is completed.
And all the other outages, were a fault on the terrestrial network, which is Neotel.
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Ah - ok., thanks Not a good start though if its designed for only 2 failures n 25 years.
 
AfricanTech said:
I am constantly amazed at how people who have no idea of how difficult it is to fix or diagnose something deeply (excuse the pun) technical and immensely complicated moan and squeal. "Yah! you know, those blerry okes must just somma fix the blinkin interwebs - I paid my 20 bucks and I don't care that the break is 4.7 km deep in the middle of the bloody ocean...."

These are probably the same people who haven't fixed the creaky door or bust light bulb that their wives have been moaning about for a year.

aaaaarghh....and I promised myself I would not feed the trolls.
Click to expand...

Actually we are the consumers, we are not supposed to know how immensely difficult it is just to get our internet running again.

It is their job to keep their link up. If they don't then they are to blame for our internet not working as it should.

It really is that simple.
 
I agree - and we are paying for a 'Service which we are not getting.
wikus said:
Actually we are the consumers, we are not supposed to know how immensely difficult it is just to get our internet running again.

It is their job to keep their link up. If they don't then they are to blame for our internet not working as it should.

It really is that simple.
Click to expand...
 
wikus said:
Actually we are the consumers, we are not supposed to know how immensely difficult it is just to get our internet running again.

It is their job to keep their link up. If they don't then they are to blame for our internet not working as it should.

It really is that simple.
Click to expand...

+1 Agree!
If its so complicated to fix then they should have designed it better in the first place. (and yes, all my home diy jobs have been done)
 
Andrewc said:
Any one remember if at any time the SAT3 cable went down for a week due to a broken repeater?
Click to expand...

If you remember, they were down for a weekend in April after some routine maintenance went horribly wrong on the link out of Angola and a technician has to be flown in to fix the problem.
 
portcullis said:
If you remember, they were down for a weekend in April after some routine maintenance went horribly wrong on the link out of Angola and a technician has to be flown in to fix the problem.
Click to expand...
Yes - there was one unprotected failure a few months back. Telkom does back up most of their circuits on SAT3 with capacity on SAFE so most of the major outages have just caused a squeeze on capacity and higher latencies for a week or two while the cables are repaired.

The issue has been that the price difference between Seacom and SAT3 is so large that some ISPs put all/most of their eggs in the Seacom basket to try and provide the cheap prices you all have been begging for and this has resulted in insufficient redundancy on certain networks.
 
that is insane!, ok if youre with mweb not if youre with axxess my uncapped account is unusable
 
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