Seacom has moved to buy redundant capacity on competing cables already in place around Africa following a spate of downtime incidents that have left some SA consumers fuming.

Seacom’s head of business development, Aidan Baigrie, admits that the cable system, which runs along Africa’s east coast from SA to Europe and India, has had “some challenges since its inception”.

“We had to make some tough decisions early on, which has made our ride more challenging.”

One of Seacom’s biggest problems is the route past Egypt. The company has battled to light up its cable in the area and has had to rely on partner cable Sea-Me-We-4 for onward connectivity to Europe.

Sea-Me-We-4 has proved less than reliable for Seacom. Many SA-based Internet service providers rely primarily on Seacom for access and cable outages have affected many SA Internet users.

Unrest in Egypt has also not helped and Baigrie says Seacom has had to handle its service-level agreements carefully with the possibility that anything could happen in the strife-torn country.

With unrest rising in the Middle East and North Africa, there is a real possibility that governments could approach Seacom and ask it to shut down the cable.

“We hope we never have to make that decision, but it is definitely something we will have to consider. We have some decisions to make around this,” says Baigrie.

He says Seacom has also had trouble getting the support and security it needs to repair outages in Egypt. He says there is also no regulation to protect cables in the shipping channel.

However, Seacom is in the process of creating a restoration service using both Sat-3 on Africa’s west coast and Kenya’s The East African Marine System. It is also negotiating a redundant service with Nigeria’s Main One cable in the west.

“The challenge here is do we start providing redundant services to customers that have not bought a redundant service,” says Baigrie.

He says some providers have started to buy capacity on other cables to make sure there is some sort of redundancy. — Candice Jones, TechCentral