Seacom says it still hasn’t finalised the last stretch of its undersea cable through the Red Sea in Egypt, a fact that has bedevilled the telecommunications system.

A fault on the Seacom cable between Mumbai in India and Mombasa in Kenya plunged SA businesses and consumers into Internet darkness on Monday, with repairs expected to take at least a week to complete.

Seacom suffered similar downtime in April when a segment on the Sea-Me-We 4 cable failed. Seacom is leasing capacity on Sea-Me-We 4 until it can get the Red Sea leg lit up.

The cable operator says it is working with its clients to find a solution and bring businesses and consumers back online.

Neither service outage would have occurred if it had already received the link through Egyptian territorial waters.

Until this link is finalised, Seacom is reliant on third-party cable systems to maintain uptime.

Seacom says it is expected to have the connection through the Red Sea up by the end of September.

“Effectively it’s just a permitting issue that needs to be completed,” says a Seacom spokesman.

Seacom says it is not the only undersea cable system to be stalled in the area. The East African Submarine System is likely to be affected by the same permit delays, it says.

Seacom had expected to have the requisite permits from Egypt by the end of June.

Meanwhile, Telkom says Seacom’s downtime has had no effect on the capacity of Sat-3 or Safe, the cable systems that connect SA to Europe via the Atlantic Ocean, and SA to Asia via the Indian Ocean.

The fixed-line operator, which is an anchor tenant on Sat-3/Safe, says failover capacity — the amount demanded from other cable operators and telecommunications companies — has not increased by much in spite of the Seacom break.

“At this point, we have not been approached by companies to create new failover accounts, but we anticipate that there will be requests for new accounts soon,” says Telkom spokesman Pynee Chetty. — Candice Jones, TechCentral