Seacom has completed the repair of its submarine cable system in the Red Sea, a month after it was broken. But the company has now identified a secondary fault, which will require four days of “service-affecting” repair work next week.

“The Seacom subsea cable marine fault identified in the Red Sea off the coast of Djibouti on 8 April 2017 has been successfully repaired,” Seacom said in a statement on Wednesday. “Customers are seeing their circuits come up and traffic routing return to normal.”

However, during the repair work, Seacom identified a secondary marine fault in the same general area in the Red Sea, it said.

It has decided to “proactively intervene at the earliest opportunity to ensure any impact to our end customers service is minimised”.

“A planned service-affecting repair is tentatively scheduled to take place from 19 to 22 May 2017.”

During this repair period, all linear transmission traffic on the east coast of Africa to and from Europe will be affected.

“Customers with Internet protocol or other managed network services will remain unaffected but could experience higher latency as traffic will predominantly be routed over Seacom’s transmission links on the west coast of Africa, as well as on Seacom’s network to Asia gateways,” the company said. — © 2017 NewsCentral Media