SEACOM’s weakest link
SEACOM experienced an unexpected outage on Tuesday after the company’s primary and secondary terrestrial backhaul routes from Mtunzini to Johannesburg failed.
There is an automatic failover from the primary to secondary transmission links, but in the case where both links fail the traffic has to be manually re-routed via a tertiary link. This manual re-routing process meant that SEACOM was down in South Africa for around 30 minutes.
According to an unconfirmed report from an ISP the initial problem on the Neotel network was caused by a fibre cut, and after traffic was automatically routed via the secondary route equipment failure on Neotel’s side caused this link to also fail. A manual switchover to a third route was then implemented.
This outage was ill timed – it came only days after SEACOM experienced downtime of a few days, caused by problems on the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable which SEACOM currently utilizes to connect to London.
Many South African broadband users were left without international connectivity during the SEACOM outages, and unsurprisingly consumers were critical of the undersea cable company.
Closer inspection of the outages however reveals that the downtime in both cases was caused by failures on their partners’ networks rather than a failure on SEACOM itself. In fact, all outages of the SEACOM undersea cable since its launch in July 2009 can be laid at the door of its partners.
The SEACOM cable itself has achieved an impressive 100% uptime since its launch, but since the company provides an end to end service from Johannesburg to London it has to take responsibility for all downtime, irrespective of the guilty party.
SEACOM seems to be well aware of the negative impact these outages has on its reputation, and is working hard to eliminate weak points in its system.
SEACOM recently announced that it is on track to finalize its own link through the Red Sea and over Egypt by the end of June 2010. “With this piece of the mesh finally in place, another critical alternative for traffic routing will become available thereby further reducing the impact of network outages for African users,” SEACOM said.
While this project has been part of SEACOM’s plan from the start, political problems delayed the construction, forcing SEACOM to prolong its reliance on the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable to connect to London.
When it comes to its terrestrial backhaul network in South Africa SEACOM continues to face challenges. This portion of the SEACOM network – which has been the cause of most of the problems experienced by SEACOM in South Africa since its launch in June 2009 – is provided mainly by Neotel.
Of concern is the fact that Neotel seems unwilling to comment on the downtime experienced by SEACOM customers on Tuesday despite the fact that they were the responsible party.
Neotel was contacted numerous times to ascertain what exactly went wrong, and what is being done to avoid a ‘double failure’ on its network in future, but despite promises to inform the public about this problem the company has still not provided details.
The lack of information from Neotel is not doing SEACOM any favors, and may well be responsible for many consumers laying the blame for the downtime at the wrong door.
Article update
After the article was published, Neotel provided feedback about the problem which occurred:
The SEACOM backhaul between Mtunzini and Midrand was down for approximately an hour an a half, as a result of two unrelated incidents. There was a fibre break on one of the long distance protection routes between Durban and Johannesburg; and a card in the primary transmission route in Durban failed shortly thereafter. Since the automatic protection route was not available, it was necessary to restore the service onto a third route manually.
Neotel has designed its national network to achieve high availability, in line with global standards, and offers Service Level Agreements to its large customers to back this. The SEACOM service was restored within the contracted requirements, and did not result in a breach of the SLA performance criteria.
Neotel is making good progress on the construction of its own new, ultra-high capacity optical fibre route between Durban and Johannesburg, as part of the joint build with MTN and Vodacom. Once this route is in place, later this year, there will be even higher availability, and capacity to carry the projected growth of SEACOM, and EASSy, Neotel’s latest international cable that is currently on track for completion in August. Over the next few months, Neotel, together with its global parent, Tata Communications and it partner, SEACOM, will be providing an alternative route for international broadcast traffic, ensuring that South Africa as a whole can achieve the highest service levels.
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