{"id":13571,"date":"2010-07-07T12:20:00","date_gmt":"2010-07-07T10:20:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-07-07T12:20:00","modified_gmt":"2010-07-07T10:20:00","slug":"seacom-to-boost-redundancy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/telecoms\/13571-seacom-to-boost-redundancy.html","title":{"rendered":"SEACOM to boost redundancy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few months many ADSL users in South Africa have become accustomed to temporary outages on the SEACOM system.<\/p>\n

Many of these outages were caused by terrestrial backhaul network problems, an issue which should be resolved after Neotel reconfigured the SEACOM backhaul in early June to ensure increased redundancy.<\/p>\n

The terrestrial backhaul problems are typically resolved within a short period of time – hence minutes or hours rather than days – but problems on the SEACOM cable itself can take days to resolve.<\/p>\n

In April this year a problem on the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system, which SEACOM currently uses to connect to London, meant that the SEACOM system was down for days, highlighting the need for redundancy for SEACOM clients in case of prolonged downtimes on the system.<\/p>\n

The latest SEACOM problems<\/a> caused by a repeater failure on the submarine cable is likely to last for around a week, reiterating the need for redundant bandwidth and a thorough disaster recovery plan.  <\/p>\n

SEACOM itself highlighted the need for improvements to system redundancy in a Twitter post, saying that they have to ensure rapid network restoration when faults occur.  <\/p>\n

This is however not particularly surprising as SEACOM is most likely facing the prospects of many ISPs looking at SAT-3\/SAFE capacity, which has built in redundancy, despite the higher price tag for international bandwidth.<\/p>\n

How the redundancy will be achieved – and more importantly at what price tag it will come – are some of the challenges SEACOM faces.  <\/p>\n

SEACOM update<\/strong><\/p>\n

In an official statement today SEACOM announced that it has successfully secured a number of restoration options for its clients through other international connectivity providers, including cable networks. <\/p>\n

“This effectively provides customers with alternatives to re-route services and restore connectivity. These restoration solutions are now being actively implemented,” said SEACOM spokesperson Frederic Cornet.<\/p>\n

When it comes to creating built-in redundancy, SEACOM explains that it is only one part of an African Internet build-up and as other cable systems come on line, there will be more redundancy between the systems. <\/p>\n

“SEACOM is already in talks with other cables due to land. As more cables reach eastern and southern Africa, the problem of redundancy will be easier to manage as more options become available to reroute capacity during an outage. It is common practice in the industry around the world for cable networks to provide redundandant capacity to one another,” said Cornet.<\/p>\n

SEACOM said it is also working on a number of projects which should be in place within months, including the installation of routers with IP MPLS capability at to the landing points of the cable.<\/p>\n

“This would make a switchover to other capacity a lot simpler. In other words, should the same fault reoccur the impact would be far less disruptive.  In addition, the finalization of SEACOM’s own link between India and Europe would provide further redundancy options,” Cornet concludes.<\/p>\n

SEACOM redundancy improvement<\/a><\/strong> << comments and views<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SEACOM downtime this week has left many Internet users and ISPs fuming. SEACOM is now looking at improving redundancy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-telecoms"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13571"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}