Repairs Underway to Fix South Africa’s Slow Internet
By Bradley Prior, MyBroadband
January 29, 2020
The ship that has been tasked with fixing South Africa’s slow Internet issues has reached its destination and has begun repairs on the broken submarine cable.
This was confirmed by TENET, which tweeted this morning that the Leon Thevenin had arrived at its destination.
“The transit to the WACS S1i cable ground is complete. Repairs are now underway by the Leon Thevenin. ETR remains 08 February 2020,” it said.
Breaks on both the SAT-3/WASC and WACS cable systems have resulted in many South Africans suffering slow connectivity to international websites.
Both of these cable systems are deployed in the Atlantic Ocean and are used to connect a number of African countries – including South Africa – to Europe.
Effect on ISPs and networks
MyBroadband spoke with several ISPs to determine how their customers had been affected by the breaks.
Cool Ideas, CyberSmart, MWEB, RSAWEB and Mind the Speed all confirmed that the break had little to no effect on their networks. This is because these networks have redundancies in place to mitigate this kind of issue.
WebAfrica, however, said the issue had initially had a large effect on their customers, but this has now been minimised with additional capacity from Seacom.
Tests run by MyBroadband found that MTN and Vodacom were virtually unaffected by the breaks, while Telkom’s network speeds were heavily reduced.
