Did an earthquake take out SA Internet?

Ship should reach cable break tomorrow

Meanwhile, the repair ship deployed to fix the cable breaks, the Leon Teverin, is due to arrive at the site of the first break tomorrow.

The ship, which spends most of its time docked at Cape Town, is operated by Orange Marine, a subsidiary of French telecommunications giant Orange. It is specifically tasked with repairs to the WACS and SAT3 cables. However, it was confined to the harbour for several days as storms lashed Cape Town in the wake of the Internet outage.

Telkom’s wholesale division Openserve issued regular updates on the status of the mission, finally announcing on Wednesday that the ship had set sail at 9.30pm the night before. 

However, it would take up to a week to reach the site of the break on the SAT3 cable, between Angola and Gabon. From there is will head to the first break on the WACS cable, further north near Libreville, Gabon. 

The cables are operated by two separate consortiums and Openserve said it “has made its resources available to both consortiums to assist wherever possible”.

Once the ship reaches each site, it must lift the cable, attach bouys, examine the cable, splice new lengths of cables to repair the break, conduct testing, and then re-lay the cables on the sea bed. The process can take another week. This means final repairs may take more than a week from today to be completed.

However, all Internet access has been routed round the breaks, typically up the East coast of Africa, and across the Atlantic from Angola to Brazil. The headache, right now, has been transferred from users to the service providers.

Pages: 1 2 3 4