ISPs hit by Seacom, Eassy cable break
Multiple submarine cable systems across Africa, the Middle East and Asia are affected by cable breaks which are believed to have been caused by a large vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed.
Two cable systems serving South Africa – Seacom and Eassy – have been affected by the cable breaks in the Mediterranean Sea.
Seacom CEO Mark Simpson said on Saturday that the company continues to work to restore transmission and getting restoration services turned on.
“However, this process is proving much more complex and taking longer than we were initially told by our suppliers and would have expected,” Simpson said.
Afrihost
Local ADSL providers give feedback
Many South African ADSL service providers use Seacom and Eassy for international connectivity, and many local broadband users continue to complain about slow international throughput.
Most service providers have already re-routed traffic to alleviate the effects of the cable breaks, but capacity limitations may influence the performance of some subscribers.
Afrihost
Afrihost director Greg Payne said that the Seacom issues are not affecting Afrihost’s network at all as they only use Seacom as a backup.
However, Afrihost uses the Eassy cable which forced the ISP to re-route traffic over WACS while the circuit is down.
Afrihost CEO Gian Visser added that there has been a phenomenal take up of the monthly ‘free GB offer’ over the last few days. “People seem to be using it as a backup measure if their ISP has problems,” said Visser.
Derek Hershaw
MWEB ISP Derek Hershaw said that the ISP has capacity on the WACS cable, but with Seacom completely down, this only covers about 45% of the total requirement.
“So most services are degraded to some extent and the particularly heavy protocols like P2P are not available at all,” said Hershaw.
“We’re in discussions with various operators to get full restoration bandwidth until the Seacom cable can be repaired. Hopefully we’ll have this in place shortly.”
Cybersmart, which has significant capacity on Seacom to serve its ADSL needs, said that the problems will result in degraded international browsing for ADSL subscribers.
Internet Solutions, which provides ADSL services to ISPs like Web Africa and Openweb, did not provide feedback by the time of publication.
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