Internet service outages in Africa caused by downtime in the Seacom subsea cable will continue for at least another week, the company says.

 

The cable, which links east Africa with India and Europe, has been knocked out by a faulty repeater, resulting in loss of service for international users and severe bandwidth restrictions for some of Seacom’s customers, Africa’s Business Report said.

 

The South African Internet Exchange has been forced to withdraw capacity from ISPs including MWeb in order to preserve enough bandwidth to deliver World Cup services.

 

Seacom said in a statement Wednesday that it was not certain of the “exact cause of the problem,” but sourced it to north of Mombasa, Kenya. 

 

It said the cable would take at least six to eight days to repair, and possibly longer taking into account transit time, weather conditions and time to locate the cable.

 

Corporate ISP Internet Solutions said it has been forced to reroute capacity through Telkom's SAT-3 cable, but said this only provides enough bandwidth after peak hours.

 

More of Africa's traffic has been rerouted to links including the East African Marine System's cables.

 

Internet provider Axxess complained to My Broadband that the outage had brought the international connectivity of its Internet Solutions-based accounts to a standstill.

 

Repairs are likely to be “hugely expensive,” a Seacom representative told Business Report. “I would put it at several million dollars,” he said.

 

Seacom is a privately-funded cable commissioned last August with up to 1.28Tbps capacity. It links South Africa, Mozambique Kenya, and Tanzania with Mumbai and Marseilles.