WIOCC, operators of the largest submarine cable on Africa’s west coast, announced today that repairs on fibre cables between Egypt and France (which broke several weeks ago) have been completed.

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.

According to him, some reports in the media have incorrectly suggested the EASSy cable suffered a break. The break, he says, is actually on cables that they use/buy capacity on for traffic to other continents.

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.

The East Africa Submarine System (EASSy) has a section of its undersea fibre cable broken since 17 February 2012. The broken section is between Djibouti and Port Sudan and according to reports, WIOCC, the consortium that owns the cable, has already started efforts to repair the cable.

WIOCC, the special purpose vehicle that TelOne is part of, has entered a strategic partnership with Cable & Wireless Worldwide to increase the reach and reliability of the WOICC cable system. The new partnership means WIOCC is now effectively invested in two additional submarine cable systems, the Europe India Gateway (EIG) and West Africa Cable System (WACS) that C&W owns.

The EASSy cable, in which local state owned fixed operator TelOne has a stake through WIOCC, has had its design capacity upgraded to 4.72 Tbps. According to the West Indian Ocean Cable Company, the upgrade makes EASSy by far the highest capacity submarine cable on the east African coast.

The recent capacity upgrade follows another upgrade to 3.84 Tbps made to the cable in August last year. The EASSy cable was launched in July 2010 with an initial design capacity of 1.42 Tbps.