MWEB looks for alternative bandwidth
2010-07-06 18:04
Johannesburg – Internet service provider, MWEB, said on Tuesday that it was in urgent and ongoing discussions with a number of providers to obtain alternative bandwidth after Seacom confirmed a failure on its international cable off the coast of Mombasa.
MWEB uses Seacom as its primary provider of international bandwidth with a limited amount of redundancy available via Telkom's SAT3 cable.
Seacom, a provider of submarine fibre-optic cable connecting communication carriers in South and East Africa noted on its website on Monday that its services between Mumbai and Mombasa had been down since 09:19 GMT/5th July 2010.
"Current investigations indicate that a repeater has failed on segment 9 of the Seacom cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombasa.
This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected," it said.
The group also pointed out that while the repair process itself would only take a few hours, the overall process may last a minimum of 6-8 days.
Derek Hershaw, CEO MWEB ISP said in a statement: "As an interim measure MWEB was able to secure alternative capacity on the SAIX network (Telkom-owned) from about 17:00 on Monday July 5, until about 14:00 on Tuesday July 6.
At that time, SAIX withdrew the capacity due to concerns over their bandwidth commitments to FIFA for the Soccer World Cup.
"MWEB is in urgent and ongoing discussions with a number of providers to obtain alternative bandwidth until such time as the Seacom capacity has been fully restored.
"We are hopeful to have some relief during the course of this evening. In the interim, local internet traffic including browsing, email and internet banking is unaffected.
"We are keeping our customers updated on email and via our Facebook page Free The Web," Hershaw concluded.
All ISPs using Seacom as a supplier of international bandwidth are affected by the outage, MWEB said.