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.
Whilst this is the configuration Seacom has been claiming for the last 9 months (see their maps), the outage on SMW4 has exposed the fact that users are not actually connected to Europe directly via a fibre pair to Marseille, but are instead routed via Mumbai, India, where the connection to SMW4 is made.
ReplyDeleteNot only does this make the system considerably less resilient (with just a single fibre pair out of Africa) - as we have seen with the 5-day outage - but it also increases latency (the timelag between pressing the button on your computer and receiving the information you've requested), which is dependent on the distance travelled.
Like last week's outage, the more recent outages this week in South Africa on the links between Seacom's landing station and Jo'burg have also been written off as "not being on Seacom". If none of this is on Seacom, why is it on the maps...?
All I'm seeking is some honesty here - if its Seacom, they have to take responsibility for it when it goes wrong. If its not Seacom, take it off the map.
I look forward to reading your blog, because its full of information that I can put to use. Thank you.
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