Undersea internet cables fixed, connection to SA restored
South Africans have been experiencing slow internet over the past month due to separate failures at two key undersea cables that connect South Africa to the global internet.
The South Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) submarine cable, which links Portugal and Spain to South Africa was hit by a breakdown near Libreville, Gabon while the West Africa Cable System (Wacs), which links South Africa with the United Kingdom saw an outage off the coast of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Technicians were sent out to sea over a month ago.
This brings to an end a long and complex restoration process that took almost 34 days to fix.
World Wide Worx technology expert Arthur Goldstuck says it's all systems go.
"The ships that went out to repair the cables have reported that they've repaired both the cables. That means that all the internet access to the rest of the world from South Africa has been restored."
Goldstuck says preliminary investigations point to seabed tremors as the cause of the breaks.
"Our investigations suggest that it was something that you refer to as turbidity currents and that's when you have underwater avalanches of sediments and that can be caused by an earthquake."
He adds the repairs will bring relief to internet service providers.
"They'll no longer have to incur the expense of having to have access on multiple cables at the same time. And that means they won't have pass on additional costs to consumers.”
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