The EASSy undersea cable runs across Africa’s Eastern coastline and is operated by the WIOCC Consortium that includes Zimbabwe’s Telone. It was commissioned in July 2010 and covers a total footprint of over 50 000km, connects to 30 African countries and provides 4.7tbps of bandwidth.
Reports emerging from out of Egypt indicate that the repeated undersea fibre cable breaks happening off the coast of Egypt are actually a result of sabotage. An article on Reuters yesterday evening says Egypt’s coastguard caught three divers cutting through an undersea Internet cable yesterday.
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.
Undersea Cable system operator, SEACOM, announced this morning that they have restored most of their customers to alternative cable routes while they work to fix the cable break between Egypt and Marseilles. According to the announcement, downstream internet providers connecting via the SEACOM cable should now be getting normal connectivity.
Zimbabwean internet providers relying on the onward fibre connectivity of SEACOM and EASSy, two of Africa’s major undersea cables, are facing major problems delivering internet services to customers as the the two cables have been down for close to 4 days
We reported last week that TelOne internet significantly slowed down for several days last week due to fibre cable damage in Mozambique. We’re getting updates this week, that while the problem is now fixed, it’s not just TelOne that was affected by the issue. PowerTel and Utande were affected too, and from what we gather, in a much more severe way.
Yesterday, another undersea fibre cable went live in East Africa. The cable, the second Lower Indian Ocean Network submarine cable (LION2) is reportedly now commercially operational LION2 is an extension of the first LION undersea cable and now provides a direct link from Kenya to Madagascar, St. Paul Reunion, and Mauritius, the three countries that were connected by LION back in 2009. LION2 also connects to the island of Mayotte, a France overseas department.
It’s now week 3 since it was first reported that an undersea fibre cable on the shores of East Africa was down. Then, it was reported that the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) had broken on 17 February 2012 and that a repair vessel had been sent to fix the problem. Eventually it became clear the situation was worse.
Stellenbosch, a town in the Western Cape province of South Africa, is set to get a Wi-Fi cloud over it offered in the next six months. According to a report in South African tech news site MyBroadband, The Wi-Fi will be available free of charge to anyone, and users of the service will not be required to register.
Seacom, African submarine fibre cable system operator, announced that Brian Herlihy is stepping down as CEO and will be replaced by Mark Simpson. Mark Simpson takes over the reins next week on 5 Septmber 2011.
Yesterday, the undersea fibre cable system operator, SEACOM, announced it has invested some US$14.7 million in terrestrial fibre infrastructure in South Africa. The investment is mainly in equipment and fibre links connecting SEACOM’s landing station in Kwazulu Natal and some Point of Presence in Gauteng. The fibre links have been purchased from Dark Fibre Africa, a South African dark fibre provider owning a network of carrier neutral, dark fibre infrastructure for the transmission of metro and long haul telecommunications traffic.
PowerTel Communications, the state owned subsidiary of national power company, ZESA, is set to launch mobile voice services on its network. PowerTel sales and marketing manager, Willard Nyagwande made the announcement at a function in Harare yesterday.
Techzim this week reached out to SEACOM chief executive, Brian Herlihy, on the recent announcement of the agreement with TDM for a direct link into landlocked countries, Zimbabwe and Malawi. In our communication with the SEACOM front man, he explained how SEACOM plans to provide more than just a basic international fibre network in these countries.
After last week’s announcement of Utande’s connection to the SEACOM undersea cable along Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique, we visited the company for more information. Prior to this, efforts to get even the slightest of a whisper from Utande were mostly unsuccessful, apparently due to acquisition negotiations with now majority shareholder, Masawara plc. We were thus glad to meet Colin Franco, the company’s chief technical officer, and Russell Clinton the Utande CEO, for a discussion and tour of the Utande data centre.
Zimbabwe is poised to benefit from a deal announced yesterday between SEACOM and Telecomunicacoes de Mocambique (TDM), Mozambique’s telecoms parastatal. The company has been granted the go ahead to connect our landlocked country to the undersea cable. This is expected to have a positive impact on corporate and individual consumers in the not too distant future.