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Seacom says repairs successfully completedNAIROBI, Jul 24, 2010 (Xinhua via COMTEX) -- Seacom announced on Saturday that it has successfully restored and tested their submarine cable which has been down since July 5. In a statement, Seacom said with the entire network now fully operational, its technical teams will continue to work closely with customers to reinstate their Seacom traffic to pre-outage configurations whilst an extensive investigation will take place to determine the exact cause of the outage. "Seacom is pleased to confirm that all repairs to the submarine cable have been successfully completed," the company said in the statement. The fault had mostly affected home users, as many businesses in the region have no back-up plans for such faults. It was the second major outage the cable has experienced since it went live last year. The outage had not affected traffic within Africa, with most local websites still accessible. The cable, finished in 2009, connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia. "With the entire network now fully operational, our technical teams will continue to work closely with customers to reinstate their Seacom traffic to pre-outage configurations whilst an extensive investigation will take place to determine the exact cause of the outage," the firm said. The Seacom submarine failure started on July 5 and it was caused by a repeater failure on segment 9 of the cable which in turn caused service downtime between Mumbai and Mombasa. Initial indications suggested that the cable system will be back only in six to eight days, but extenuating circumstances like the fact that faulty section of the cable is at one of the deepest points along its route meant that the repair work took longer than expected. During the outage Seacom and service providers worked together to find alternative solutions to alleviate the impact of the downtime. These solutions involved various other systems, including using the SAT-3/SAFE and TEAMS submarine cable systems. When the cable was completed in July 2009, it promised to bring down the cost of a connection and boost internet access across the region. However, experts say that costs are still out of the reach of many people who live in the region. Outages of this kind happen periodically. A cable cut in the Mediterranean in 2008 temporarily disrupted up to 70 percent of internet traffic to Egypt and 60 percent to India. |