Photo Credit: dlohner from Pixabay
This could not have come at a worse time. With South Africa in lockdown, the recent WACS cable break will be more apparent due to the large number of the population working from or entertaining themselves at home.
WACS Cable Break Impact on South Africa
As with the previous break, connectivity to the UK will be affected, but there will probably not be any problems accessing Europe and the Americas.
The WACS outage was first noticed on the 27th of March 2020 at 23:28 by SA NREN on Twitter.
We are observing our WACS capacity as down since 23h28 UTC/27th March 2020. A call has been logged with our provider for feedback. Traffic has failed over to SEACOM and EASSy cable systems and there is currently no impact for SA NREN traffic.
— SA NREN Operational Updates & Alerts (@RENAlerts) March 28, 2020
They also reported that the reason for the interruption is a complete cable cut near the end of the cable in the UK.
SAT-3
In addition to the WACS cable break, is a break in the SAT-3 cable off the coast of the Congo and Angola, close to where the January breaks were.
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South African ISPs
Webafrica is one ISP that had difficulties due to the WACS cable break and say they are making plans to get higher speeds to customers.
We are currently experiencing slow speeds due to WACS undersea cable breaks.We are busy attending to the issue and will keep you updated on our Network Status page: https://t.co/YfZIzLVddE #networkoutage #WACS #TENET #internetoutage #underseacablebreaks pic.twitter.com/egjzCRmuv5
— Webafrica (@webafrica) March 28, 2020
Afrihost has the same challenges as Webafrica and also routed traffic through other avenues in order to keep supplying customers with high speeds.
We’re rerouting traffic managing our international traffic across the alternate paths to make sure we keep packet loss at bay and improve the experience for all our clients. Thank you once again for your patience. pic.twitter.com/ku53Wq8WtA
— Afrihost (@Afrihost) March 29, 2020
These two ISPs probably purchased extra capacity on the Seacom, SAFE and EASSy cable systems running on the east coast of South Africa, landing in Mtunzini in Kwa-Zulu Natal. During the SAT-3 and WACS cable break, exchanges will route traffic from the three alternative cables through South Africa, to limit slow speeds.
Estimated Repair Time
Both problems are being attended to and will hopefully be fixed by this weekend.
TATA owned vessel Ile D’Aix is on its way to the WACS cable break near Highbridge in the UK and the Leon Thevenin is already busy with repairs on the SAT-3 break.
The ETR for the SAT-3 break is the 2nd of April 2020 while the ETR for the WACS cable break is the 4th of April 2020, as the ETA for the Ile D’Aix is only tomorrow, 31st of March 2020.
Closing
Luckily for us, exchanges make the world easier when one – or more – internet avenue breaks, by giving us the option to work through other avenues. The dual cable break that occurred in January this year also gave us a practice run on how to deal with such challenges.
