Cable repair ship to fix South Africa’s broken Internet lands in Cape Town

[Nat Quinn]

The cable layer Léon Thévenin is moored in Cape Town harbour after a nine-day voyage from Mombasa, Kenya, MarineTraffic reports.

It had arrived in Kenya on 6 August, just as a suspected rock fall in the Congo Canyon caused breaks in the West Africa Cable System (Wacs) and South Atlantic 3 (Sat–3) subsea cables.

The Léon Thévenin was mobilised for deep-water repair but could only start its return journey on 12 August.

It was expected to land in Cape Town on 22 August but managed to arrive a day early.

After resupplying, the cable layer must make its way over 3,600km up Africa’s western coast and locate the site of the breaks.

Previous estimates indicated the earliest the Léon Thévenin could have Wacs repaired is in two weeks, around 8 September, subject to weather conditions.

The breaks on Wacs and Sat–3 have wreaked havoc on broadband speeds and stability in South Africa.

However, what has been curious about this Wacs break (the last major incident was in 2020) is that it is no longer the highest capacity link connecting South Africa to Europe.

Last year, the massive Google-owned Equiano and Facebook-backed 2Africa cables made their first landings in South Africa.

Although 2Africa is not yet live, Equiano is. Several other high-capacity international subsea cables are also available from South Africa, including Seacom, EASSy, Ace, and Peace.

Services and service providers that have bought protected circuits with sufficient redundant capacity on these cables have been unaffected by the Wacs break.

However, several major content owners and distributors do not appear to have enough redundant capacity, including Facebook and Akamai.

Akamai is a global content delivery service provider used by Disney+ and TikTok.

This is significant because, nowadays, much of the content Internet users in South Africa access is stored on local servers.

African Undersea Cables by Steve Song / ManyPossibilities.net (CC BY-2.0)

Data-heavy services like Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, and TikTok effectively made it free for South African ISPs to access their content at local Internet exchange points.

The increasing use of caching and content delivery networks, and Teraco-owned NAPAfrica’s push for free peering in South Africa is part of the reason fast, uncapped broadband became affordable.

However, these global content owners and distributors can’t duplicate everything on local servers yet, as there are cost implications.

When a South African wants to watch a Facebook or Disney+ video that isn’t available locally, it must be fetched from their overseas servers, using capacity from an undersea cable.

With Wacs offline, Facebook and Akamai seem to struggle to bring content from their international servers to South Africa during peak video streaming times — usually between 18:00 and 22:00.

This indicates that both companies rely heavily on Wacs and don’t have sufficient backup capacity on alternative cables.

During peak times, Facebook and Akamai have been disabling routing to their local servers, forcing South African users to fetch content from servers in Europe, Kenya, and Malaysia.

This effectively shifts the problem onto local Internet service providers, who were left scrambling to make a plan to increase their international capacity.

Akamai did not acknowledge the issue until after MyBroadband first reported on it.

It has not responded to our requests for comment, and last updated its network status page on 14 August 2023.

“We are continuing to work with our third-party service provider to investigate this issue,” Akamai stated.

 

SOURCE:Cable repair ship to fix South Africa’s broken Internet lands in Cape Town (mybroadband.co.za)

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