By Macharia Kamau
Internet Service providers connected to the African Marine Systems (Teams) undersea fibre optic cable were left counting losses after the cable was cut on Saturday.
The mess left Internet users unconnected for long periods. Also affected were international voice calls to and from the region and business process outsourcing.
Service providers rerouted their traffic to Seacom cable. Julius Opio, Seacom’s Head of Sales in East and North Africa said the company was providing backup capacity to Teams customers in the region. Heavily affected by the outage were huge consumers of connectivity capacity operators of business process outsourcing and IT enabled services (BPO/ITES) companies.
The industry is among the heavy consumers of bandwidth and guaranteed connectivity. Munjal Shah managing director Techno Brain – a BPO/ITES firm – said his firm had been experiencing interrupted provision of connectivity and had affected delivery of work since Saturday.
"The primary providers that we are at the moment down and I have rerouted traffic to two other services providers. They are however not giving us sufficient capacity and we are experiencing a downtime of between 25 and 40 per cent," Shah said in a phone interview.
"Such levels of interruptions are costly for us because at the end of the day, we bill clients on what we deliver. Downtimes mean that we are taking longer to deliver on one job."
While some of the services have been restored, none of the firms was committal as to when normal services will resume. The cut occurred five kilometres into the sea from the Mombasa landing station Saturday 25 mid-day and was caused by a ship.
"We wish to notify all our stakeholders of the ongoing emergency repair works and apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. The cable should be fully operational within the next three weeks," said Teams’ General Manager Joel Tanui in a statement yesterday.
Tanui said Teams had notified the undersea cable maintenance company E-Marine to commence repairs.
Data recovered
Safaricom said it had managed to partially restore data services for its customers, by successfully migrating all its Internet traffic to alternative routes, principally the Seacom undersea cable. This resulted in partial recovery and resumption of services. "As a result of the cable cut, Safaricom customers experienced low internet speeds as the firm actively cut over to alternative routes. Other services affected by the cut included international voice calls and Blackberry services," said Bob Collymore Safaricom chief executive.
Teams is one of the three undersea fibre optic cables that service the region, with other countries tapping into the link from Kenya through terrestrial fibre networks. Other undersea cables are Seacom and the East African Submarine Cable System.
