By SEACOM

During the course of the past week, SEACOM has continued to work closely with its partners to roll-out the repair work programme and restoration alternatives necessary to maintain adequate connectivity during this process.

The designated ship has been deployed to the location of the fault where it will proceed to locate the cable on the seabed. This will take place within an extended perimeter as the cable will have moved around the seabed from where the installation ship dropped it over a year ago. This is normal and caused by the natural sea bed movements and strong submarine currents in that area.

Once located with the help of cable station staff and specialised equipment, the cable will be picked up before being brought onboard the ship to undergo the necessary repair. This will include cutting the cable to remove the affected portion, reviewing the physical integrity of the cable before proceeding with the initial splicing of the spare cable segment which has been be tested and prepared while in transit onboard the ship. When the final splicing is completed, the entire system will be thoroughly tested before the cable is lowered back in the water. Part of this process will entail the reconfiguration of the power supply to shut down and isolate the affected portion of the cable. This will only have a minimal effect on the intra-African services which remained unaffected by this outage.

Although the repair schedule remains on-track, with a completion date estimated for the later part of next week, a number of exogenous factors including location, water depth, currents  and weather make this cable outage very difficult to repair.