SEACOM downtime frustrates clients
Two independent sources today informed MyBroadband that they experienced a three hour SEACOM downtime. According to these sources the downtime started shortly after 06:00 this morning, and the system was only restored after 09:00.
Another source said that their experience with SEACOM has been anything but good, with regular outages which complicate their testing and integration of SEACOM bandwidth into their network.
MyBroadband spoke to TENET CTO Andrew Alston, and he said that TENET has not experienced any SEACOM landing station downtime yet. Alston said that there were some cable breaks on their Dark Fibre Africa terrestrial backhaul network, but that these problems were resolved very quickly. This part of the TENET network is however not using Neotel’s network which may explain the more stable service.
Neotel today confirmed the downtime, saying that the reason for the downtime was two-fold: “There are three routes available to protect the Seacom service, but this morning two of them were down. There was a fiber break on the Transnet infrastructure on the main route between Stanger and Empangeni, as a result of vandalism,” said Wandile Zote, executive head of communications at Neotel.
“It automatically shifted to the second route, but there was a second break on the alternative route between Port Elizabeth and Cape Town, therefore we have now had to manually shift to the 3rd route which runs through Durban, Pietermaritzburg and Bloemfontein.”
SEACOM could not be reached for comment by the time of publication.
SEACOM & Neotel downtime – comments and views
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