Damaged WACS and Sat-3 cables won’t be repaired before mid-September
Liquid Dataport said it has seen a surge of internet traffic on its new West African coast cable Equiano due to multiple subsea cables break last weekend. The surge follows breaks in the WACS and SAT–3 undersea cable systems off the coast of Democratic Republic of Congo.
The breaks were caused by a rock fall in the underwater Congo Canyon, one of the largest on earth, cutting across the continental shelf of West Africa for 85km until it reaches the shelf edge, then continuing down the slope, ending 280km from its origin. At its deepest point, the V-shaped canyon walls are 1100 meters high.
Unlike previous breaks, Southern Africa did not experience significant degradations in their network performance due to recent investment in cable infrastructure from the likes of Liquid Dataport and others.
“As part of Liquid Dataport’s disaster recovery process and to offer high redundancy, we have migrated our customers’ West Coast traffic to our new Equiano subsea cable,” Liquid Dataport CEO David Eurin told Mobile Europe. The Equiano cable runs much further away from the shores than WACS and SAT3 cables, which might explain why it was not affected by the event.”
He said the possible cause was another strong turbidity current in the Congo River’s offshore undersea canyon.
“[Equiano’s availability] has ensured that our customers were unaffected and is also a key differentiator for us compared to other wholesalers that do not have access to similar infrastructure,” he said. “According to industry experts, the repairs to the two cables should be completed by mid-September, pending repair ship availability in this area.”
He added: “We are also in the process of upgrading our global network to be able to cope with additional customer demand… While this additional capacity has brought in a much-needed increase in bandwidth in Western and Southern Africa, the redundancy is also the reason why we are able to minimise the impact on our customers.”
While Telkom SA’s wholesale fixed-line division Openserve and Broadband Infraco suggested they have been able to reroute traffic, MyBroadband reports that the cable breaks have disrupted the backbone link of Discord’s service provider, Ubisoft-owned i3D.net. While Discord users in South Africa can still join and create voice chat channels, these are being hosted outside the country.
Liquid Dataport has been expanding its terrestrial network as well as the undersea cables. Last month, it announced plans to expand its fibre backbone to connect Luanda, Angola and Lusaka, Zambia directly. This follows Liquid’s launch of a new 2500km fibre link between Lobito, Angola and Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Ship in the wrong place
According to Africa Ports, the Cape Town-based Léon Thévenin cable ship only arrived this week in Mombasa for another repair job meaning the estimated time for it to reach the Congo mouth is within the first three weeks of September.