Wednesday, May 05, 2010

East Africa’s fibre link outage, in comes satellite

The past few days were a frustrating experience for users of the Internet in East Africa, particularly in Kenya due to intermittent outages in the fibre optic cable operated by Seacom and The East Africa Marine System (Teams) occasioned by repairs on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable along the Mediterranean Sea.

This led to major ISPs reverting back to satellite services, recently abandoned in favour of the fibre optic cable, so as to cushion customers against total loss of communication. The satellite connection was the main link for East Africans as attempts were made to repair the fibre cables. This proves that despite its technological inefficiencies, satellite connectivity should and must be retained as a back up system in any economy, particularly for any developing economy at its nascent stages of information technology growth.

And as is becoming the norm in Kenya, cable vandalism has been increasing to such an extent, especially among the major players in the sector.

This has not gone well with the end users who had high expectations that costs of bandwidth would go down considerably, and in turn stimulate growth in other sectors.

The repair work on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable was completed successfully on 29 April 2010, with the major regional and continentals ISPs, including SEACOM, being migrated .

SEACOM was the first cable to provide broadband to countries in East Africa. Within Africa, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya are inter-connected via a protected ring structure. Additionally, a second express fibre pair is provided from South Africa to Kenya. The two fibre pairs have a combined capacity of 1.28Tbs. Express fibre pairs are also provided from Kenya to France into a PoP in Marseilles, and from Tanzania to India into the PoP in Mumbai. SEACOM has procured fibre capacity from Marseilles to London as part the SEACOM network.

fiber-cables

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