Seacom Connectivity

great that there are more undersea cables coming to improve our connectivity, but they too will come with errors / damage / breakage / bad weather / pirate attacks etc, i think the key to staying marginley happy is never to get your hopes up :)
 
I think everyone is missing the point. The majority of usage is P2P, so shape that to death on the DSL packages, and reroute the rest over the other links.
This is what Afrihost is now doing with their proxy, and while it is still slow, I can accept at - at least I can open Google and get to the few web pages I need for work.

Me = happy, now that I have some international again.

The complaints are not generally about "I paid R200 for uncapped and now I cannot leech the interwebz", they are about the total cutoff of international despite their being at least two other connections available to IS, and the availability of local proxies to cache a lot of the need.

And for those who *do* fall into the "leech the interwebz for R200", tough cookies - I agree with all the other responses in this regard - suck it up. You can watch Heroes / House or whatever next week.
 
Its crap for me I cant visit any pages again the only site that works for me is this site not even Facebook works!
 
:(

It is amazing what a difference SEACOM did make if a break in their link can cause this much disruption! Telkom really seems to have pissed people off something TERRIBLE!!!! :D
 
The complacency is amazing.

It seems the ISPs who went the SEACOM route had no plan B. The proxy's they have set-up are useless.

Now that SEACOM is a dead duck in the water, international connectivity is impossible. I can't get e-mails, I can't even get access to my servers overseas.

A ping to Germany shows 75% packet loss or total time outs on an Afrihost capped DSL account.:sick:

I guess uncapped accounts get priority while we the capped users "sponsor" the bill.
 
Webafrica seems to be working fine. :)

Afrihost is a little wonky...
 
Who needs Denial of Service attacks if you have only Seacom. Viva!

How to: disconnect Africa from the www?. Drag an anchor over the SEACOM cable in the Med.

So how many of you are considering SAIX backbone again? Eish.
 
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Biggest bunch of whining I have seen in my life. Yeesh! Seacom will be fixed soon and then we can surf to our hearts content.
 
Any update on the progress with the repair?
Any MWEB users unable to connect to astraweb?
 
Well I've been surfing just fine here on M-Web.

M-Web said progress is good and it'll maybe be fixed tonight. I'm sorry, I'm not subscribed to Astraweb otherwise I'd check.
Lets hope it is fixed ASAP,

I am able to browse the web, all pages seem to load, but DL speeds are very slow, I'm on a 4mb line and am getting 6k second.

Any other MWEB users unable to connect to Astraweb?
 
Biggest bunch of whining I have seen in my life. Yeesh! Seacom will be fixed soon and then we can surf to our hearts content.

Show me the contingency plans the local Seacom dependant ISPs had; because nothing they have come up with so far worked.

From the lack of effective plan "B"s it seems plausible to think that the ISPs who went the SEACOM only route; thought SEACOM was invulnerable. Its not. Hope they learnt a lesson from this.

Piss poor forward planning. International downtime affects my business - and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Sustainability in Africa.
 
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What I don't really get is that "after hours" the Afrihost ADSL worked perfectly. (Busy to download important monthly backups) such as for example during the weekend (when the seacom problems started), yesterday and all night.

But the same as Monday morning at about the same time, the Afrihost ADSL just went DEAD on international this morning so I had to revert to WebAfrica to download mail and do other important things (no download).

WHY?

To recoup.

Whole weekend NO problem with internet. Monday morning till .... DEAD. Yesterday all day until early this morning excellent (working and download of the backups). This morning again DEAD.
 
You guys need to switch over to the ISP Discussions board. Some seriously out of touch things being said. First up, there is nothing wrong with the Seacom cables, the issue lies with SEA ME WE 4 on a section of their cable which runs in the med. The only reason this is a major issue right now is because SEA ME WE 4 is not the only cable in that region that has damage. You can't blame the ISPs, they have done what they are able to do to ensure working contingencies. Unfortunately at this point their only options are Seacom and Sat3. Sat3 is a lower capacity cable, and is the entire reason we had absurdly expensive internet in this country to begin with. Most ISPs are making use of Sat 3 as a back up at the moment, but there is only so much capacity, so its not running at full speed. Seacom as far as I know is also still carrying traffic, but because the route through the med is down, their only route is to India.

You have to remember, this is a problem affecting virtually all of Africa, the Middle East, India and the rest of South East Asia. The SEA ME WE 4 cable that is down is a very high traffic cable, so ALOT of traffic from these other regions are also directed through all of the backup routes available to us.

Multiple new cable systems are in the process of being installed the world over however, so we are unlikely to see these kind of issues very much in the future.
 
Go to your command prompt run the command tracert to an overseas IP or domain based in Europe and or UK or USA. You'll be able to see the routing to there and where it falls over en route.

My software traces the exact route and gives a visual picture of where the route dies.

Another problem is the contention ratio on the route available - obviously it cannot cope and like servers hit by a denial of service attack if one overloads a server or consumes its resources they crash.

At the moment all my connectivity dies here.

Node Data
Node Net Reg IP Address Location Node Name
4 1 1 196.38.72.217 28.800S, 32.100E cdsl1-rba-vl2460.ip.isnet.net
Registrant:
Internet Solutions
Bryanston, Gauteng 2021
ZA

Domain Name: ISNET.NET
 
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You guys need to switch over to the ISP Discussions board. Some seriously out of touch things being said. First up, there is nothing wrong with the Seacom cables, the issue lies with SEA ME WE 4 on a section of their cable which runs in the med. The only reason this is a major issue right now is because SEA ME WE 4 is not the only cable in that region that has damage. You can't blame the ISPs, they have done what they are able to do to ensure working contingencies. Unfortunately at this point their only options are Seacom and Sat3. Sat3 is a lower capacity cable, and is the entire reason we had absurdly expensive internet in this country to begin with. Most ISPs are making use of Sat 3 as a back up at the moment, but there is only so much capacity, so its not running at full speed. Seacom as far as I know is also still carrying traffic, but because the route through the med is down, their only route is to India.

You have to remember, this is a problem affecting virtually all of Africa, the Middle East, India and the rest of South East Asia. The SEA ME WE 4 cable that is down is a very high traffic cable, so ALOT of traffic from these other regions are also directed through all of the backup routes available to us.

Multiple new cable systems are in the process of being installed the world over however, so we are unlikely to see these kind of issues very much in the future.

+1. Well said.
 
Connectivity Via Seacom from SA - Day 4

AFFECTED POPS: international traffic between SA and London/New York
START DATE: Sun 25 Apr 10 14h00 (SAST)
END DATE: Estimated (tentative) 30 April 2010
EXPECTED DURATION: Unconfirmed
IMPACT: Service interruption - no connectivity
REASON FOR CHANGE: SMW4 repairs affecting Seacom traffic

ADDITIONAL INFO:
Seacom has advised that repair maintenance work is still in progress, affecting traffic across the Seacom cable system.

Bottom line: Service interruption - still no connectivity
 
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