Another Internet Cable Fault Hits South Africa
By Jan Vermeulen, MyBroadband
August 23, 2024
Several links on the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) have been offline since Tuesday due to shunt fault, MyBroadband has learned.
An industry source with knowledge of the situation explained that traffic to the Middle East and Central and Eastern Europe was the most affected and seeing increased latency.
However, unlike the incidents earlier this year, the fault does not appear to have caused major disruptions to the continent’s Internet.
EASSy is a 10,000 km submarine cable system along the east coast of Africa, with nine landing stations in Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya, Tanzania, Comoros, Madagascar, Mozambique and South Africa.
It is a consortium cable owned by several telecommunications companies, including WIOCC, MTN’s Bayobab, Vodacom DRC, Liquid Intelligent Technologies, and Telkom.
WIOCC is the largest shareholder in the EASSy consortium.
According to TeleGeography, the other owners are BT, Bharti Airtel, Botswana Fibre Networks, Comores Telecom, Djibouti Telecom, Etisalat UAE, Mauritius Telecom, Orange, Saudi Telecom, Sudatel, Tanzania Telecommunication Corporation, Telkom Kenya, Telma, and Zambia Telecom.
A shunt fault is a type of power feed problem that occurs when the insulation protecting a submarine cable becomes damaged.
These cables use underwater amplifiers to boost the light signal propagating along their fibre optic strands, which require power.
Power is fed from either end of the cable and flows along a metallic outer core that surrounds the optical fibre.
These cores — the fibreglass and conductor — are wrapped in insulation and protected using a strong material like Kevlar.
However, damage can still occur from ship anchors, fishing trawlers, backhoe dredgers, powerful ocean currents dragging the cable, or even sea creatures like sharks.
When the insulation becomes damaged, it can create a short circuit from the cable’s metallic core to the seawater, causing a shunt fault.
A WIOCC spokesperson told MyBroadband that the cause of the cable break is currently unknown.
