Triple cable break hurts international connectivity

ambo said:
SAFE goes directly across the Indian Ocean: From the Kwa-Zulu Natal coast, via Mauritius and India to Malaysia. The problem is that most websites and servers that South African's are interested in are hosting either in Europe or the USA. Via SAFE that would be 800+ms of latency. There are also routes out of Mombasa and Djibouti going East that would allow you to hop off EASSy or Seacom and bypass these danger zones but once again this is a very long path to get back to the US ;)
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Wow that latency is worse than satellite! SAFE doesn't have enough bandwidth to be a redundant link for Seacom/EASSy does it?
 
Bern said:
Wow that latency is worse than satellite! SAFE doesn't have enough bandwidth to be a redundant link for Seacom/EASSy does it?
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SAFE is not very large but the bigger issue is that you don't normally buy short term capacity on these cables. Its normally not less than a 12 month contract and more typically a 10 year contract. It becomes very expensive to have this capacity 'just-in-case' - particularly when it costs 10-100 times what the same capacity on the newer cables does.
 
Seem a fourth cable break has now occurred:
NAIROBI—Undersea data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe were severed in two separate shipping accidents this month, causing telecommunications outages in at least nine countries and affecting millions of Internet and phone users, telecom executives and government officials said.

A ship dragging its anchor off the coast of the Kenyan port city of Mombasa severed a crucial Internet and phone link for the region Saturday, crippling electronic communications from Zimbabwe to Djibouti, according to a public-private consortium that owns the undersea cable.

The Indian Ocean fiber-optic cable, known as The East African Marine Systems, or Teams, is owned by a group of telecom companies and the Kenyan government. It was the fourth cable to be severed in the region since Feb. 17.

The Teams cable had been rerouting data from three other cables severed 10 days ago in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East. Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second and form the backbone of East Africa's telecom infrastructure.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203833004577249434081658686.html
 
ambo said:
We're not seeing impact from this in ZA but Kenya, Uganda and other parts of East Africa have virtually no usable Internet now.
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Are they going to be using WACS for redundancy when it is fully operational (currently in testing AFAIK)? When are the cross continent links going live?
 
In ZA the ISPs will be able to connect to WACS to get extra redundancy. This cable runs up the west coast and is nowhere near Kenya or any of the other east African countries. They are unlikely to see any direct benefit.
 
ambo said:
In ZA the ISPs will be able to connect to WACS to get extra redundancy. This cable runs up the west coast and is nowhere near Kenya or any of the other east African countries. They are unlikely to see any direct benefit.
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Surely they can buy from Seacom and EASSy to SA and then from there to WACS?
 
ambo said:
In theory you probably could but the latency is typically the dealbreaker.
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I would think the latency to Europe can't be that much extra considering all the East Coast cables all run next to each other, so for a redundant link I would take the extra latency vs NO connectivity! Ideally there should be some terrestrial cables to connect up to the west coast options to reduce latency, but I don't see that happening any time soon..
 
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