WACS downtime concerns: ADSL ISPs respond
The West African Cable System (WACS) has informed its clients that there may be downtime between 4 June and 8 June while repairs are done on one of the cable segments. This forced some ADSL ISPs to look for alternative bandwidth during this period.
WACS told its clients that there is a suspected fault on one of the cable segments, and that the cable ship has been dispatched.
The ship is expected to reach the fault area on 4 June 2013, and the tentative date of repair is estimated to be 8 June 2013.
WACS warned that traffic on the system is expected to be down during the repair period.
ADSL ISPs respond
Derek Hershaw
MWEB ISP CEO Derek Hershaw said that they are aware of the issue, but are still awaiting final confirmation of the exact date of the repairs.
Hershaw added that he does not expect the WACS issue to have a significant impact on their ADSL network.
“If we only use our Seacom capacity it is still sufficient to cover all our international bandwidth requirements, other than during a very small window at around midnight when it will only meet 90% of our total requirement,” said Hershaw.
“We are, however, trying to get a couple of extra Gigs to plug that hole as well,” Hershaw said.
Alan Kirton
Web Africa CTO Alan Kirton said that they have not heard anything from their providers around any potential WACS issues to date.
“Although we have capacity on WACS it is not one of our primary paths so in the event of an outage we do not foresee any major customer impact,” said Kirton.
Telkom spokesperson Pynee Chetty explained that their customers will not be affected by any planned maintenance on the WACS cable.
“Telkom’s significant global capacity via each of the three cable gateways into and out of the country makes it possible to offer more diverse, redundant, high capacity global service solutions,” said Chetty.
Richard Boorman
Vodacom spokesperson Richard Boorman said that they do not anticipate any impact on their broadband customers, because they have multiple redundant links in their network.
Vox Telecom also indicated that their customers will not be affected by the potential WACS outage.
Laurie Fialkov
Cybersmart CEO Laurie Fialkov said that they have been informed about the planned maintenance. “We have been told to expect downtime during the maintenance – at the very least the cable will be ‘on and off’ over this period,” said Fialkov.
Fialkov explained that Cybersmart has capacity on three cable systems – WACS, Seacom, and SAT-3 – which lessens their dependence on a single cable system.
“At any given time our network can cope with a single system failure. With an unplanned failure, some non-essential services such as P2P are slowed down during the outage,” said Fialkov.
“For this event, we had lots of notice, so we have procured some additional capacity to see us through the maintenance window. Our ADSL customers should not be affected at all,” said Fialkov.
“Although this additional bandwidth comes at quite a significant premium, we believe it is money well spent to keep our customers happy.”
Afrihost and Internet Solutions did not respond by the time of publication.
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