SEACOM network configuration may impact traffic
Over the last few months SEACOM has been blamed for a lot of the international connectivity problems experienced by broadband users in South Africa, but it is telling that all the outages of the SEACOM undersea cable since its launch in July 2009 can be laid at the door of its partners.
The SEACOM cable itself has achieved an impressive 100% uptime since its launch, but since the company provides an end to end service from Johannesburg to London it has to take responsibility for all downtime, irrespective of the guilty party.
It is therefore unsurprising that SEACOM is pushing to complete its ‘full’ cable system as soon as possible, a move which will provide the company with additional redundancy and stability.
SEACOM recently announced that it is on track to finalize its own link through the Red Sea and over Egypt by the end of June 2010. “With this piece of the mesh finally in place, another critical alternative for traffic routing will become available thereby further reducing the impact of network outages for African users,” SEACOM said.
While this project has been part of SEACOM’s plan from the start, political problems delayed the construction, forcing SEACOM to prolong its reliance on the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable to connect to London.
Landing in Egypt
SEACOM recently said that it is preparing for the final network configuration for its landing in Egypt, and this “may cause momentary interruption to SEACOM services”. The reconfiguring is planned for 30 – 31 May.
SEACOM however told MyBroadband that they do not expect any downtime, but added that there may be “slowdowns in traffic flow at critical points in the process”.
According to SEACOM this ‘network configuration’ will entail the reconfiguration of the branching unit in the Arabian Sea (to add the link to Egypt) and the recalibration of the power feeding equipment to support single end feeding to Egypt from South Africa.
“This network configuration will enable customers to experience improved services through the use of the shortest route to Europe. As you know, SEACOM presently connects via India and onwards to Egypt and Europe through the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable,” SEACOM said.
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