Broken undersea cables slowing down South Africa’s Internet repaired
Telkom’s wholesale and networks division Openserve has announced that the South Atlantic 3 (SAT–3) undersea cable has been repaired and connectivity restored.
SAT–3 was the last of three cables to be repaired that suffered breaks due to a suspected rockfall in the Congo Canyon off the West coast of Africa on 6 August.
The other two were the West Africa Cable System (WACS) and the Africa Coast to Europe cable (ACE).
Openserve is a landing partner for the WACS and SAT–3 undersea cable system consortiums in South Africa.
When the breaks happened, cable laying ship Léon Thévenin was immediately mobilised for deep-water repair, but it had just arrived in Mombasa, Kenya, on another job.
Initially, the earliest estimated time to repair the WACS fault was Friday, 8 September, with the caution that poor weather conditions could cause delays.
The Léon Thévenin left Mombasa on 12 August and arrived back in Cape Town on 21 August.
Fortunately, Cape Town’s weather continued to hold, and the cable layer could depart for the location of the cable break, 3,600km up Africa’s west coast, on 24 August.
It arrived at the site of the break on 30 August and began effecting repairs.
Confirmation that WACS had been repaired came in late on Tuesday, 5 September.
The Léon Thévenin immediately switched to repairing the ACE cable, which it expected to complete by 13 September before beginning work on SAT–3.
“The completion of this work is good news for Internet users as this means that there is more available capacity and improved network resiliency,” Openserve stated.
The WACS break in particular wreaked havoc on broadband speeds and stability in South Africa.
This was despite it no longer being the highest capacity link connecting South Africa to Europe.
Last year, the massive Google-owned Equiano and Facebook-backed 2Africa cables made their first landings in South Africa.
Although 2Africa is not yet live, Equiano is. Several other high-capacity international subsea cables are also available from South Africa, including Seacom, EASSy, and PEACE.
Services and service providers that had bought protected circuits with sufficient redundant capacity on alternative cables were unaffected by the WACS break.
However, several major content owners and distributors did not appear to have enough redundant capacity, including Facebook and Akamai.
Akamai is a global content delivery service provider used by DStv Stream, Disney+, and TikTok.
Following the WACS cable repair, the performance of these services improved substantially.
During peak times, Facebook and Akamai disabled routing to their local servers, forcing users in South Africa to fetch content from servers in Europe, Kenya, and Malaysia.
This effectively shifted the problem onto local Internet service providers, who were left scrambling to make a plan to increase their international capacity.
Akamai did not acknowledge the issue until after MyBroadband first reported on it.
It has not responded to our requests for comment and last updated its network status page on 24 August 2023.
“We are continuing to work with our third-party service provider to investigate this issue,” its latest update states.
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