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Latest on international connectivity crisis
Posted by: YunaMonos on Apr 28, 2010
SEACOM posted an update on their FaceBook page this morning (around 10am) that they are expecting repairs to their undersea cable to be completed by 22:00 (UCT). Meanwhile thousands of South Africans have been without international internet connections since the weekend. What have we learned from this fiasco? I’d say it has proven the old adage, don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Local consumers will probably never know the whole truth, but Internet Solutions has plenty of explaining to do.
From a number of conversations and a great many threads on the www.mybroadband.co.za forums, I have deduced that the service providers most direly affected by the SEACOM outage, run on IS backbone. It further seems that Internet Solutions has no (or very little) redundancy for some of their resellers like Afrihost.
This means that individual customers and small businesses are not catered for should something happen to IS’s primary international data pipe, i.e. SEACOM. Considering how aggressively cheap IS-based uncapped ADSL has been marketed through resellers like Afrihost, the situation is highly irresponsible.
I understand that redundancy is costly, but this week’s connectivity crisis proves that it is very necessary. Repairs which were supposed to have taken only a day (according to initial official releases from SEACOM) are now in day four. Luckily there was a public holiday in between, but this outage has primarily been during business hours.
Sole proprietors and SMEs have opted for these new cheap uncapped services in droves and it is impossible to put numbers on the amount of money these businesses have lost. Twitter accounts have been inaccessible, Facebook too. Not to speak of Gmail accounts, which are widely used by sole proprietors to cut costs.
It is incredible to what extent South African service providers and companies are allowed to flout accountability, especially in the telecommunications industry. Consumers are expected to remain passive and understanding, while an essential business service is cut off. They are expected to continue paying for a service not received and when they demand to be kept updated about what is going on, more often than not they are placated and no more.
As I mentioned on the SEACOM FaceBook wall this morning, if this had been the UK or the US, SEACOM would have been drawn and quartered by the media for remaining virtually mum about what exactly is causing the delay in progress. Throughout this saga SEACOM has posted very few and very vague official updates once every day or two. Their PR department should be fired, and if they don’t have a PR department, they urgently need to hire a PR agency that knows how to work with the press and the public.
The days of South African companies shrugging their shoulders or commenting when it suits them, are numbered.
An emergency phone call distributed through the internet has nearly ruined Toyota. It will take years for this multinational to re-cement its previously solid reputation. Bloggers, Tweeters and FaceBookers had plenty to do with it and South Africans are cottoning on. We also wait with eager anticipation for the National Consumer Act to be introduced later this year.
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Important update:
Last night, after I wrote this blog I received a phone call from SEACOM Head of Product Strategy Suveer Ramdhani. They had taken note of what I had written and wanted an opportunity to air their side of the story. Ramdhani agreed that they had not handled the publicity around the matter very well, but insisted that they never meant to create the impression that they were withholding information.
"We are a new company and this is the first time something like this has happened to us. In hindsight we should have been more proactive and set up a service with regular updates. Even if it was only to say that we don't have anything new to add. If anything, we have learned from this experience and we will handle matters differently in the future."
According to Ramdhani, SEACOM had had trouble communicating with the team responsible for the repair of the cable and were not regularly updated themselves.
The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable that has been causing all the havoc is a consortium cable over which SEACOM doesn't have control. SEACOM does however partially rely on this cable for global connectivity. The SEA-ME-WE 4 downtime affected services throughout the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia.
As I write this, it is Thursday morning and it seems that the repair crew managed to stick to last night’s midnight deadline. As far as I have been able to establish, international services to most ISPs have been restored.
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