EASSy submarine cable downtime may last for days

Hmm, not really an issue for me or probably many others, other than ISP’s using it for redundancy.

I really don’t know of any company that uses it come to think of it.
 
EASSy is an operators cable and so there is generally much less publicity about their customers. (Unlike Seacom ;) )

As you can see from the article, Telkom and Neotel both have circuits. MTN is a shareholder so they would also probably have circuits.

This is not going to be like the big Seacom outage of 2010 but we have 20-30% less international capacity with the cable down.
 
Not that any of us would actually notice... EASSy means diddly squat to South African consumers.
 
MickeyD said:
Hmmmmm.... let SAT3 go down and then say that :p
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You say that... but international traffic on my SAIX based circuits has been routing via EASSy for a number of months now and the congestion yesterday with EASSy being down was quite horrible.
 
ambo said:
You say that... but international traffic on my SAIX based circuits has been routing via EASSy for a number of months now and the congestion yesterday with EASSy being down was quite horrible.
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Very true... as it was probably all pushed onto SAT3, making every non-Seacom route a bit more congested than normal. I wonder if Telkom retained the Seacom capacity that they purchased for the 2010 SWC?
 
MickeyD said:
Very true... as it was probably all pushed onto SAT3, making every non-Seacom route a bit more congested than normal. I wonder if Telkom retained the Seacom capacity that they purchased for the 2010 SWC?
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Most likely as you don't simply purchase capacity for a couple of months from the cable operators.

Generally they will do 5-10 year contracts.
 
I thought this was Seacom again and though "what a surprise"... now I am surprised that Seacom isn't down! :)
 
EASSy? Who are they? Are they actually operational, or is this some sublicity stunt?
 
dabbler said:
Are they actually operational, or is this some sublicity stunt?
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I don't recall when the cable launched but I've been using circuits on the EASSy cable since mid-March last year.
 
What is it with these east coast cables near the Horn of Africa that they seem to have far greater problems than others?
 
markings said:
What is it with these east coast cables near the Horn of Africa that they seem to have far greater problems than others?
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There are only 4 systems at the moment reaching South Africa. EASSy and SEACOM both run around the east coast of Africa, with WACS around the west coast. WACS is not yet live in SA (and therefore we don't know if it goes down), and SAT3 has connections around both sides of Africa, so if either side goes down the cable system as a whole isn't down. Neither SEACOM nor EASSy are redundant, so failures immediately affect their users.

Then there is political issues, the pirates in Somalia, the revolts in places like Egypt, SEACOM's troubles with SEA-ME-WE-4, etc. We will have to compare WACS to the two other systems when it comes online to see what the difference in reliability is.
 
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Valerion said:
There are only 4 systems at the moment reaching South Africa. EASSy and SEACOM both run around the east coast of Africa, with WACS around the west coast. WACS is not yet live in SA (and therefore we don't know if it goes down), and SAT3 has connections around both sides of Africa, so if either side goes down the cable system as a whole isn't down. Neither SEACOM nor EASSy are redundant, so failures immediately affect their users.

Then there is political issues, the pirates in Somalia, the revolts in places like Egypt, SEACOM's troubles with SEA-ME-WE-4, etc. We will have to compare WACS to the two other systems when it comes online to see what the difference in reliability is.
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What about SAFE? :p
 
Garyvdh said:
Not that any of us would actually notice... EASSy means diddly squat to South African consumers.
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They can't have a disruptive affect like Seacom as prices were already dropped before they came live. SAT3 dropped their prices a while back to compete with WACS as well, BUT EASSY adds a whole new circuit for redundancy if nothing else which makes a HUGE difference. Put it this way - if you use two cable systems and you want 100% redundancy you need to buy full capacity on each. right. But, if you use 4 cable systems you only need 25% extra capacity over the others to cover redundancy for one cable failure. That is a big saving and it allows for way more resilience.

So in short it helped reduce price to an extent, but mainly if has provided redundancy at reasonable prices (you can have a 2 cable setup without Seacom for example).
 
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