Browsing: Seacom

The East African Submarine System, the second high-capacity fibre-optic cable along Africa’s east coast, is live. However, local Internet users will have to wait until at least August to enjoy any benefits. The West Indian Ocean Cable Company, the largest shareholder in Eassy, announced this week that the cable is ready to be tested by its owners.

The Seacom submarine fibre-optic cable system should be back online by late next week after a repair ship arrived at the site of the fault in the Indian Ocean. “The designated ship has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will proceed to locate the cable on the seabed,” a Seacom spokesman says.

Australia’s government is trying to push the idea of a national broadband network, or NBN, through that country’s parliament. It wants Australian taxpayers to build a A$43bn fibre network that connects 90% of homes with broadband access of up to 100Mbit/s. To put that in context, in SA most households with Internet access are lucky to get an effective 1Mbit/s into the home.

Seacom, the undersea cable, may be offline until 22 July. A Seacom spokesman warned on Friday that repairs may only be finalised much later than initially thought because of various factors, including the depth under the ocean of fault. Seacom went offline on Monday, cutting off broadband users whose service providers buy capacity on exclusively on the Seacom system. The service disruptions have hit MWeb, part of Naspers, and downstream service providers from Dimension Data’s Internet Solutions particularly hard.

Seacom has secured alternative capacity options for its customers, but Internet service providers will be charged a “small premium” to use them. A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya cut off many Internet users on Monday, with repairs expected to take a week or more.

Internet service provider MWeb, part of JSE-listed media group Naspers, is urgently seeking an alternative solution for its broadband customers…

Seacom says it still hasn’t finalised the last stretch of its undersea cable through the Red Sea in Egypt, a fact that has bedevilled the telecommunications system. A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya plunged SA businesses and consumers into Internet darkness on Monday, with repairs expected to take at least a week to complete. Seacom suffered similar downtime in April when a segment

Seacom may soon cut international bandwidth prices. The cable operator’s first anniversary this month also marks the end of price-cutting restrictions placed on it by some of its anchor tenants. Brian Herlihy, Seacom’s president, says the agreement with anchor tenants — other telecommunications companies — ends on Seacom’s one-year anniversary on 23 July