Fighting Seacom downtime

Teraco and Seacom have worked double time this past week to reconnect clients affected by a cable break that happened North of the coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea, the companies announced in a press statement today (2 April 2013).

“With SEACOM located close to their clients in the data centre, we were easily able to connect them to a different SEACOM routing environment to give them additional capacity,” said Teraco CEO, Lex van Wyk.

Teraco said it is the most connected data centre facility in Africa, offering connectivity to major international service providers which have network connectivity on SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, EASSy, and WACS.

Mobile carriers Vodacom, MTN, and Cell C; local carriers including Telkom, Neotel, and Broadband Infraco; and fibre infrastructure provider, Dark Fibre Africa are all connected at their data centre, Teraco said.

“The benefits of being in a neutral data centre like Teraco and close to our clients means that no last mile replacement is required in the event of an outage,” said Claes Segelberg, Seacom CTO. “We’ve also been able to work with partners like Teraco to swiftly identify solutions to give our clients additional capacity in situations like we’ve faced over the past couple of days.”

Teraco explained that to implement this restoration, the Seacom team had to identify, negotiate and sign contracts to establish multiple paths across the Mediterranean on cable systems that were unaffected by the recent cable cuts.

Once these routing paths were chosen, cross connects at the Egypt and Marseille terminals had to be manually coupled by teams deployed at both sites.

Lex van wyk

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