Wacs cable break to be repaired as soon as this weekend

A cable ship has been sent to fix the break in the West African Cable System (Wacs) off the coast of England.

The vessel, the Ile D’Aix, should arrive at the “cable grounds” by Tuesday, 31 March.

This is according to the latest updates from Tenet, the Tertiary Education & Research Network of South Africa, which is a major user of Wacs bandwidth.

In a tweet on Monday morning, Tenet said the estimated repair date is Saturday, 4 April.

TechCentral reported on Saturday that Wacs had suffered another break — its third this year — at the worst possible time for South Africa, with many people now relying on home broadband connections to work during a three-week national lockdown.

Fortunately, the repairs look set to happen much quicker this time around. The previous breaks took over a month to fix after the departure of the repair ship, the Leon Thevenin, was delayed due to storms in Cape Town.

Diverse routes

An earlier break on the smaller-capacity and older Sat-3 cable, which follows a similar route to Wacs along Africa’s west coast to Europe, has compounded the latest outage to some degree. The Sat-3 break, which is off the coast of the Republic of Congo, is now likely to be repaired on Thursday, 2 April.

In the interim, telecommunications carriers and Internet service providers are making use of diverse routes on other cable systems, including Seacom and the South Atlantic Cable System, or Sacs.  — (c) 2020 NewsCentral Media