If you’re still experiencing slow and intermittent drops of connectivity even after SEACOM announced yesterday that they restoration was complete, it’s because there’s a new failure. Apparently, one of the cables they had restored some traffic to, one called SEA-ME-WE 4, has also failed.
SEACOM posted the update this morning on their website and social media pages. The SMW4 cable suffered a failure off the coast of Egypt.
Since SEACOM is working with other providers to restore connectivity on alternative routes, it’s possible that other cables (like EASSy) that were affected by the first cable break on 22 March, have also been affected this time.
In Zimbabwe, internet services have once again slowed down significantly, after only one day of relief. Users of internet services, both fixed and mobile broadband, have reported a slowdown of traffic since early morning. It’s not clear how long restoration from this new failure will be completed. It will however be weeks (2 at least since last Friday) until the first failure has been fixed.
Here’s the full update from SEACOM:
SEACOM can confirm that at 06:20 GMT 27 March, the SMW4 cable system suffered a cable cut off the coast of Egypt. Earlier this morning, SEACOM had restored all services on both SMW4 and IMEWE cable systems.
SEACOM is currently in the process of prioritizing and reallocating already available capacity for customers and sourcing further capacity to re-establish full restoration.
We will update further as information becomes available.
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11 comments
i think its high time ministry of ICT have stingent measures on all our IAP’s, just like in the banking sector. Because this business or relying on one cable for the whole country is now kind of boring. every IAP should have at least 2 gateways with different physical redundancy. this is not only crippling normal users but slowly affecting the economy on a micro scale. we need to take connectivity serious as a country at the moment.
I think the state needs to build a cyber military task force.
What is wrong with us Africans!!?? How on Earth do we manage to break these cables at least once in every quarter of the year? Who should really be blamed? The ship operators or the fibre layers? Im beginning to think the fibre layers aren’t doing it properly. Its just like here in Zim where I see some of these Liquid guys puting fibre cables 10-30cm into the ground and I just think to myself surely an overzeleous gardner is goin to find a way to accidentaly chop this cables when he’s redoing the outside landscaping due to the damage done by the fibre diggers.
We do not appreciate free education.
I think they’ve found a recovery to the recovery cable because my powertel is up. And for the first time since purchase about 2years ago I actually hit 1mbps!…So eitther A: I’d just used the internet before everyone else noticed it was back so it was uncongested or B: Powertel is actually improving :O …after all in their new print ads they are promising us 3.1mbps…though I know thats just the EVDOs max capacity it would be nice to at least get half of that regularly.
The Korean guys used an ancient tool call backtrack 5
This one got me spinning.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-21963100
if that is true you can not really blame the “cable guys” this time as it seems intentional sabotage
shame on those divers…..