The recent devastating storms that affected the eastern side of South Africa have “wreaked havoc” on Telkom’s wholesale arm, Openserve, the company said on Thursday.
The storms have led to a significant increase in network-related faults in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal coastal areas.
“Services in Gauteng have been hit hard, particularly on the West Rand,” Telkom said.
“This is because Gauteng has a high water table which has led to flooding of Telkom’s underground infrastructure,” it said. “The flooding has restricted workmen from accessing the fault zone and will cause delays in repair times.”
In KwaZulu-Natal, the extent of the damage to infrastructure spans buildings as well as indoor and outdoor core and access network infrastructure. The full impact is still being assessed, Telkom said.
“In both provinces, overhead cables have also been affected with trees becoming waterlogged resulting in branches breaking or falling onto overhead cables with resultant damage. Lightning has also caused damage to the cable network and customer premise equipment.”
Openserve’s chief of operations, Lucas Ndala, said the company is doing its best to restore services as soon as possible. “To assist, additional resources are being mobilised from other areas of the business.”
All available technicians will work additional hours as required, Ndala said. “In the event of power outages, key Openserve infrastructure sites are equipped with standby generators that can last up to eight hours.” — (c) 2017 NewsCentral Media
- See also: Gauteng storms knock out MTN towers