Cable breaks caused wide disruption: EASSy
Recent cable breaks in the Mediterranean Sea that affected the Seacom and Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) disrupted services to all continents “to a greater or lesser extent”, explained Chris Wood, CEO of the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (WIOCC).
This is because Seacom and EASSy aren’t the only systems dependant on the cables that were cut, Wood said.
“These cables are used by numerous operators – including WIOCC – in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia.”
However, the severity of the disruption is dependent on the level of route diversity employed by the various service providers in each region, Wood added.
“When cable cuts occur, the impact on the end user is felt much less where service providers have diversified their traffic across multiple systems,” Wood said.
“One of the problems over the last few years is that many African operators and ISPs have not taken advantage of all of the cables now serving the continent.”
According to Wood, Internet service providers (ISPs) have tended to purchase large amounts of capacity on a single system, or limit their diversity to two systems.
Chris Wood
“This may enable low cost services but it does so at the risk to service quality,” Wood said.
Asked what WIOCC has done to mitigate the impact of such cable breaks to its customers, Wood said that they offer diverse routing across areas such as the Mediterranean.
This lets telcos and ISPs minimise the impact of such events on their own customers, Wood said.
“Furthermore, when cuts such as happened on Friday do occur, WIOCC immediately implements its own restoration plan to restore customer traffic to alternative systems until the damaged cable is repaired,” he added.
Wood said that over the last few days WIOCC has been working around the clock to restore traffic to affected customers.
“This process is now largely complete,” Wood said. “Customers should not notice any material impact on latency or quality of service on the alternative route.”
When the repairs to the affected cables are completed, Wood said that WIOCC customer traffic will be returned to its original routing.
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