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Local Internet service providers (ISPs) are battling to keep their customers up and running after Seacom went down on Monday, and are spending heavily to plug into different pipes.
Seacom's undersea cable gave up the ghost when a repeater failed between Mumbai and Mombasa, at the deepest point along its route.
A cable ship has been dispatched to the site, but it will have to locate and lift the cable using robotics, replace or repair the repeater, and then drop the cable again. This process could take between six and eight days, according to Seacom, but as weather conditions are a factor, the company cannot be completely certain that it will not take longer.
While access to local sites and services is not affected, ISPs are battling to maintain International connectivity. Some are doing so by reverting to Telkom's cable, SAT-3, which comes at a cost.
“Unfortunately, this is only possible where additional bandwidth is available,” says Sean Nourse, executive of connectivity at Internet Solutions (IS). “We are uncertain at this stage as to the financial impact this is having on IS and will only understand the full effect once the outage has been resolved.”
Afrihost, another ISP, is routing client connections through a proxy server that can offer international access via its hosting environment on SAT-3. “I won't give numbers, but it is costing us every day Seacom is down,” says sales director Greg Payne.
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