SAT-3 repairs drag on; Seacom operations fully restored

Seacom operations fully restored: 4 November 2011

Undersea cable operator Seacom announced today (4 November 2011) that repairs have been completed on a broken cable off the coast of Egypt that caused an outage on its network.

Seacom said that its cable network was successfully repaired on 29 October 2011 and all circuits were restored to the core network as of 4 November 02:00 GMT.

All Seacom traffic to Europe was affected by the break which happened on 8 October 2011 on one of their Mediterranean backhaul service providers’ cables between Abu Talat and Marseilles. Initial indications were that the break would take 12 days to fix.

The cable operator announced that it had restored services to its business customers via alternate routes on 14 October 2011. This was followed by similar restoration to the rest of its clients on 20 October 2011.

“Our partner network has informed us that the assigned cable ship worked in optimal weather conditions for the duration of their repairs. The cable was quickly lifted, the new cable spliced in, tested and re-laid thanks to close coordination between the ship crew and on-shore support,” Seacom said in an announcement on their website.

SAT-3 repair taking longer than expected

MWeb told their subscribers today (4 November 2011) that they have received an update stating that the SAT-3 undersea cable is still “problematic” and the completion date for repairs is now estimated to be 8 November 2011.

Originally, Web Africa said that SAT-3 repairs were expected to be finished on 2 November 2011.

The fault on SAT-3 was caused by a break in the cable 180km from Goonhilly, at the landing station in Portugal, Web Africa said earlier this week.

Web Africa said that a cable laying ship, Wave Sentinel, had already landed in Brest, France, and was expected to reach the break by 23:30 UTC on 2 November 2011. Weather permitting, Web Africa said that they hoped to see the cable fully operational by later that night.

While the reasons for the longer repair time aren’t clear at this stage, MWeb said that its alternative capacity will remain in place until repairs are completed.

“We hope that this will keep your frustration levels to a minimum,” MWeb said.

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