Cable interruptions slow 'Net in eastern and southern Africa

A delay in repairing a fault on the Mediterranean section of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system has caused major connectivity issues in eastern and southern Africa, raising concerns about an over-reliance on international connectivity.

Both TEAMS and SEACOM fiber optic cables use SEA-ME-WE 4 for connecting to London. The delay in a repair that was supposed to take a few minutes has caused slow Internet connectivity as ISPs switched to satellite service redundancy plans.

According to a statement from SEACOM, SEA-ME-WE 4, which stretches from southeast Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East, was initially scheduled to undergo repairs in the Mediterranean Sea on April 17, but the work was rescheduled to April 24. But by Monday of this week, service had yet to resume.

"The ongoing repair work is affecting several cable systems and has impacted negatively on the overall Internet connectivity in many regions across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which rely to some extent on the availability of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable for global connectivity," said the press statement on SEACOM's Web site.

Although SEACOM says it is working with some operators to route the capacity to an Internet access point in India, the repair work is managed and controlled by SEA-ME-WE 4, which has indicated that the repair window may be extended to this Friday.

The slow connectivity has raised issues of local content and hosting, as most ISPs grappled with reduced capacity on satellite, compared to what is usually provided via fiber.

"By keeping local traffic within our borders, it will help us save on the international capacity required to surf the 'Net and in return it will reduce the cost of connectivity. The only problem is that we don't have enough of our local content residing within our borders," said Vincent Wang'ombe, marketing manager at Kenya Data Network, an infrastructure company within east and central Africa.

The lack of local content in the region and the desire to reduce costs of international transit has led to regional infrastructure projects in east Africa, mainly driven by bigger companies like KDN and Wananchi Group.

"Access Kenya has acquired direct connectivity to South Africa through its Tier 1 partner, TATA Communications enabling traffic destined to the southern African region to go direct instead of through Europe," said Raymond Macharia, Access Kenya Group CTO.

Internet exchange points in east and southern Africa have also developed, as more companies peer at he exchange points as one of the ways to keep content local.

"Access Kenya has benefited from the Internet Exchange Points; reduced international transit capacity and lower latency for local content has provided product flexibility by enabling the provisioning of local connectivity to clients with no need for international transit," added Macharia.

Larger ISPs in the region have also developed portals that provide information and also act as e-commerce sites. For instance; KDN runs www.butterfly.co.ke and also has a mobile payment gateway while Access Kenya runs www.home.co.ke.