Slow internet could last another two weeks
It might take another two weeks for a ship to reach and repair one of two damaged undersea cables that have slowed down the internet in South Africa.
Last week internet users were hit with slow internet after two key undersea cables that connect South Africa to the global internet were both hit by separate failures.
The South Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) submarine cable, which links Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the way, has been hit by a breakdown near Libreville, Gabon.
Meanwhile the West Africa Cable System (Wacs), which links South Africa with the United Kingdom, also along the west coast of Africa, saw an outage off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Openserve has released a statement confirming that the process of repairing the broken SAT3/WASC and WACS cables has begun.
ALSO READ:
Slight increase in consumer inflation
StatsSA says food and non-alcoholic beverages increased by 3,9% year-on-year and contributed 0,7% of total CPI, with Bishop pointing out that there is typically an increase in food, housing utilities and transport prices over December.
World Wide Worx technology expert Arthur Goldstruck says it is a complex process that might take at least two weeks to complete.
Goldstruck adds that there's no risk of a blackout during the repairs.
"They did say that ship would leave by this evening and that means it will take about a week to get there and it will take a week to repair the cable so we're looking at two weeks from now.
"While they're repairing it they'll continue using the backup cables."
A number of internet service providers (ISP) have been affected, including Afrihost and WebAfrica.
"A lot of service providers had access on one cable and then backup on the other cable but the main access and their back up went down at the same time," says Goldstruck.
The cause of the damage is still unknown.
"At this stage no one knows what actually happened or why or how they broke except for the assumption that it would likely to be a ship's anchor because that's how typically these breaks happen,” Goldstuck adds.