No SAT3 failure says Telkom

Telkom said in a press statement issued today (7 November 2011) that the SAT3 undersea cable is fully operational and not experiencing any technical difficulty at the moment.

According to Casper Kondo Chihaka, head of Telkom Wholesale Services, the failure is on a submarine cable “used to extend some services from SAT3 between Portugal and the UK,” and that the bulk of Telkom services that run on the capacity of that cable are fully restorable.

“Several publications have erroneously reported a failure of the SAT3 cable”

Last week, WebAfrica and Mweb informed their customers that a fault on SAT3 did cause some connectivity issues.

Chihaka confirmed that at the time of the failure on 30 October 2011, a few Telkom customers were impacted, but said that these services were restored within minutes.

On 4 November 2011, Mweb informed their customers that the repair to the cable had been delayed.

Telkom confirmed this today, with Chihaka saying that the repair of the cable between Portugal and the UK has not been completed due to adverse weather conditions

Chihaka added that “None of the traffic rerouted to the restoration route is experiencing any outage. Telkom therefore reiterates that the SAT3 cable is fully operational and none of its Internet customers are impacted by this failure.”

Questioned about Telkom’s statement in the context of Mweb’s announcement last week, Mweb CEO Rudi Jansen explained that SAT3 takes you as far as Sesimbra, Portugal. Service providers can choose from a variety of options to connect from there all the way through to London, but they are technically not the SAT3 cable.

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