There’s finally some good news on the Seacom front. If all goes according to plan, the undersea cable system will be fully operational again from tomorrow (Friday). According to a Seacom spokesman, physical repairs to the submarine cable are in the final stages of completion.

“The entire system is currently undergoing testing before the cable is lowered back into the water,” the spokesman says.

“Our technical teams are working actively with all customers to reinstate their Seacom traffic to pre-outage configurations and all connectivity going out of Africa is expected to be fully restored on 23 July 2010.”

The fault, in a repeater system 4,7km under the surface of the Indian Ocean, first occured on the cable on 5 July, meaning by the time it comes up on Friday, it will have been offline for nearly three weeks.

Consumer broadband digital subscriber line users have been worst affected by the outage, particularly those such as MWeb and Afrihost which didn’t immediately have alternative routes to carry the bandwidth.

The Seacom outage should be the last time a cable fault has such a dramatic impact on the SA Internet. With a new cable system — the East African Submarine System — about to go live along a similar to Seacom, there will soon be a redundant path for Internet traffic.

New cables in the west, including the West African Cable System and the Africa Coast to Europe cable, will add to the number of redundant systems available to Internet service providers. — Staff reporter, TechCentral