Twin cable breaks impacting SA internet

Two subsea broadband cable breaks were resulting in slow international connectivity on some internet providers on Monday.

Openserve, Telkom’s wholesale subsidiary, which is responsible for the cable landing stations in South Africa for both the West African Cable System (Wacs) and Sat-3, confirmed in response to a query from TechCentral that both cables are affected and it is “collaborating with the consortium partners to facilitate the restoration of the cables”.

Sat-3, the older of the two cables, carries relatively little international internet traffic; Wacs, on the other hand, is a more recent cable system and is used extensively to carry traffic between South Africa and Europe.

Broken subsea cables are repaired by specialised ships, one or more of which will have to be commissioned to go to the site of the cable breaks and begin repairs. TechCentral was not able to ascertain the reason for the cable breaks or where exactly they occurred. However, state-owned infrastructure company Broadband Infraco tweeted that it had information that the break in the Wacs cable had occurred in the Congo Canyon off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo, 3 686km north of the Yzerfontein landing station near Cape Town.

Until recently, a break in two submarine cables would have meant the global internet being barely accessible by South African users. However, new, high-capacity cables have been built in recent years, providing much more bandwidth along diverse routes, meaning that when there is an outage, the impact is no longer as serious.

Still, the Wacs and Sat-3 outages do appear to be affecting the performance of some service providers. A speed test to London on Vodacom Business fibre, for example, delivered a download speed of just 3Mbit/s on Monday afternoon.

Cable breaks

Telkom claimed the impact on its network is “limited to customers on the international private leased-circuit services”.

“The Openserve network remains robust due to our investment in other international cable capacity, hence all Openserve IP transit services traffic has been automatically rerouted, ensuring our customers stay seamlessly connected. No official restoration timeline has been communicated by the consortium.”  — © 2023 NewsCentral Media

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