Another Internet cable fault hits South Africa

Several links on the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) have been offline since Tuesday due to shunt fault, MyBroadband has learned.

An industry source with knowledge of the situation explained that traffic to the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe was the most affected and seeing increased latency.

However, unlike the incidents earlier this year, the fault does not appear to have caused major disruptions to the continent’s Internet.

EASSy is a 10,000 km submarine cable system along the east coast of Africa, with nine landing stations in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa.

It is a consortium cable owned by several telecommunications companies, including WIOCC, MTN’s Bayobab, Vodacom DRC, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and Telkom.

WIOCC is the largest shareholder in the EASSy consortium.

According to TeleGeography, the other owners are BT, Bharti Airtel, Botswana Fibre Networks, Comores Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, Etisalat UAE, Mauritius Telecom, Orange, Saudi Telecom, Sudatel, Tanzania Telecommunication Corporation, Telkom Kenya, Telma, and Zambia Telecom.

A shunt fault is a type of power feed problem that occurs when the insulation protecting a submarine cable becomes damaged.

These cables use underwater amplifiers to boost the light signal propagating along their fibre optic strands, which require power.

Power is fed from either end of the cable and flows along a metallic outer core that surrounds the optical fibre.

These cores — the fibreglass and conductor — are wrapped in insulation and protected using a strong material like Kevlar.

However, damage can still occur from ship anchors, fishing trawlers, backhoe dredgers, powerful ocean currents dragging the cable, or even sea creatures like sharks.

When the insulation becomes damaged, it can create a short circuit from the cable’s metallic core to the seawater, causing a shunt fault.

A WIOCC spokesperson told MyBroadband that the cause of the cable break is currently unknown.

“A better understanding will be known once the fault has been brought onboard the vessel,” they said.

“The fault will require the cable to be cut for repairs, leading to a temporary loss of traffic to Mtunzini,” WIOCC said.

“However, the system has been reconfigured to operate between Port Sudan and Maputo, ensuring that all services remain nominal in this configuration.”

This is the second time EASSy has been hit by a cable fault in three months.

In May, it was hit by a break affecting multiple cable systems that took down all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa.

That outage came shortly after the repair of a quadruple cable break in West Africa off the coast of Côte d’Ivoire near Abidjan, which disrupted traffic between South Africa and Europe.

The faults occurred on 14 March and impacted the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Sat-3, Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), and MainOne.

According to MainOne, the breaks were caused by a submarine landslide.

Repairs to Sat-3 were completed in early April, while a second cable ship was dispatched to repair the other three cables.

The ACE cable was repaired on 17 April 2024. WACS suffered two breaks, which were repaired on 30 April. MainOne announced that its cable was repaired on 10 May.

This latest shunt fault on EASSy initially had an estimated time-to-repair of 25 August 2024.

However, this has been pushed back due to high winds and high sea swell near the cable break.

“Repair work commenced today after the vessel remained on standby and under weather watch yesterday. Anticipated adverse weather conditions in the coming week may further impact the repair schedule,” a WIOCC spokesperson told MyBroadband.