South Africa’s big Internet edge

Multiple submarine cable breaks have affected South Africa’s Internet capacity this year, bringing the country close to crippling outages on a few occasions.

However, the country’s geographic location has enabled a stable Internet connection during decreased capacity.

For instance, the most severe Internet outage occurred on 14 March, when four undersea cables suffered near simultaneous outages off the coast of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire.

These cables were the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3 on Africa’s Western coast.

MainOne was the only cable of the four that does not extend to South Africa.

Due to the location and depth of the breaks, the cable owners ruled out sabotage, stray boat anchors, and other human activity as possible causes for the outages.

This left a submarine landslide as the most likely explanation.

As a result, West African countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Niger, Benin, and Ghana all experienced paralysing Internet outages.

Submarine cable operator and network service provider Seacom said it had redirected its West African cable traffic to Google’s Equiano cable, a process it says happens automatically when a break is detected.

While South Africa had the benefit of access to East coast cables as a backup, countries on Africa’s West coast do not have that luxury.

The same goes for the cables laid on Africa’s East coast.

However, because South Africa is located at the tip of the continent, many of the cables connecting Africa to the world land here.

This means that even if a large number of cables were to be damaged, such as on 14 March, the country would not be completely deprived of submarine fibre Internet capacity.

The country has ten cables landing at its shores with a combined capacity of over 400Tbps, including 2Africa, ACE, WACS, SAT3, EASSy, Equiano, and Seacom.

A month after the March breaks, the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and Seacom experienced an outage just after three of the four West coast cables had been repaired.

EASSy is a 10,000km undersea fibre optic cable system connecting countries in Eastern Africa to the rest of the world.

The cable is a core telecommunications component carrying the region’s voice, data, video, and internet traffic.

At the time, Liquid Intelligent Technologies group CTIO Ben Roberts confirmed on Twitter that all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa was offline.

While South African users were complaining about poor Netflix performance and issues with some other online services, Roberts said Internet services to East Africa were severely impaired.

This demonstrates how much redundancy South Africa has when it comes to undersea capacity.

As Seacom mentioned, redundancy measures are implemented to ensure cabe breaks don’t result in a complete Internet outage.

However, to ensure the best-case scenario in that situation, various cables need to connect the country in question to the rest of the world.

Fortunately, South Africa has an abundance of cables that have landed on its shores, giving it increased redundant subsea Internet capacity.