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SA back online - My interview with SEACOM
Posted by: YunaMonos on Apr 29, 2010
This morning at around 3am international connectivity was to most South African ISPs. According to SEACOM repair work to the SEA-ME-WE 4 undersea cable was completed during the course of last night. SEACOM’s Head of Product Strategy Suveer Ramdhani sheds some light about some of the reasons why things went so badly wrong.
Yuna Monos: There are many anxious South African internet consumers out there who are eager to know whether we are now out of the woods with international connectivity.
Suveer Ramdhani: The repair work on the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable was completed successfully overnight and all customers, including SEACOM, are being migrated and reconfigured by SEA-ME-WE 4 this morning. Several SEACOM customers are already restored and we expect traffic for all SEACOM customers to be fully restored by mid-morning GMT.
YM: Yesterday, in one of my blogs I sharply criticized SEACOM for not posting regular progress updates to keep consumers in the loop, why was there so little information?
Suveer Ramdhani: SEACOM issued an initial notification about the possible disruptions on Friday 23 April 2010 via its website and other online platforms. This was supported by extensive preliminary engagements with all customers (including ISPs) to ensure that they were able to maintain service during the repairs. It is worth noting that ISPs who opted to work with us to find alternative connectivity (routing to an Internet Access point in India, etc…) were able to maintain services throughout the repair work.
The repair work was managed and controlled by SEA-ME-WE 4 and SEACOM has been reliant on them entirely for updates. Very few meaningful updates were received from them but we did pass these on to our customers (including ISPs) for them to update their clients in turn. We also actively posted updates on our website as well as through FB, Twitter… as they became available throughout the process.
We do recognize that the community would prefer more frequent updates and will see to that in the future.
YM: I understand that the cable which underwent the repairs doesn’t belong to SEACOM, so why was SEACOM customers so badly affected by it being out of commission?
Suveer Ramdhani: SEACOM currently utilizes the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable to connect to London from Mumbai. SEA-ME-WE 4 is completely independent from SEACOM and is owned by a consortium of sixteen international telecommunications companies. This separate submarine fibre-optic cable stretches from South East Asia to Europe via the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East (www.seamewe4.com). All SEACOM traffic destined for Europe is carried through this cable and a disruption to this cable directly affects SEACOM’s ability to route traffic efficiently.
In addition, the ongoing repair work affected several cable systems and impacted negatively on 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.
YM: Why did the repairs take so much longer than expected?
Suveer Ramdhani: To date we have not been able to find out the exact details as to why the repairs took longer than expected but will be working closely with the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable consortium to get answers. The consortium has also not disclosed the cause of the problem.
I was pleasantly surprised when my cellphone rang at around 6 last night and Suveer was on the phone. He had taken the trouble to track me down in order to respond to some strong criticism I posted to the SEACOM FaceBook wall and other forums (including this one) yesterday. Although I stand by the fact that SEACOM should have been more proactive with their public communication, I am satisfied that there was no intention to withhold information from the public.
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