Massive resources needed
Vodacom spokesperson Byron Kennedy sympathised with the plight of smaller ISPs, pointing out that massive resources were needed for a guaranteed service.
“Success factors for a resilient network include elimination of single points of failure, equipment and infrastructure redundancy, sufficiently dimensioned, geographically diverse routes, able to withstand multiple simultaneous failure scenarios,” he said. “It takes weeks to implement fixed telecommunications links involving various multinational operators to be implemented. All of this needs to be in place, together with efficient traffic engineering to ensure all routes are available at all times to carry traffic.
“Restoration requiring human intervention and coordination amongst operators in different countries can be very time-consuming and inefficient. It requires significant resources and prior investment to ensure a carrier-grade service at all times.”
It was essential for carriers like Vodacom to invest in such resources, he said, since more than 80% of the Internet content in South Africa is typically sourced from Europe and North America.
MTN, the single biggest investor in the WACS cable, also has a stake in the ACE and EASSy cables. It was briefly affected by the outage, said MTN SA’s executive for corporate affairs, Jacqui O’Sullivan.
“MTN SA currently uses the EASSy cable system which has sufficient capacity to accommodate the international bandwidth demand,” she said. “The shift in traffic onto the EASSy cable system resulted in an increase in international latency and a degradation in throughput for fixed-line subscribers, which was mitigated shortly after the WACS outage. No mobile subscribers were affected.”
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