Some good news: SA internet speed has been restored from today

The West African Cable System broke last Friday and the repair vessel has spent the past few days patching it up.

Picture: iStock

The SA National Research and Education Network (Sanren) has confirmed hat the repair ship Ile D’Aix has now repaired the West Africa Cable System (Wacs) submarine cable that broke just over a week ago.

WACS Outage Update: We have had final confirmation that the WACS repairs are complete and everything is according to specification. This matter is now resolved from an SA NREN perspective.

— SA NREN Operational Updates & Alerts (@RENAlerts) April 4, 2020

The break was detected just before midnight last Friday evening by Sanren, a major user of the cable on a section of cable between England and Portugal.

On Tuesday morning, the vessel had reached the Bristol Channel. The estimated repair date was given as Saturday, which has proven to be the case.

According to Sanren, users throughout South Africa should be enjoying the same speeds they had before.

The country had been struggling with slow internet during the first week of the lockdown, with many people trying to work and study from home.

It came just two months after two unrelated breaks at the sites of two key undersea cables that connect South Africa to the global internet.

According to Business Insider ,the South Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) submarine cable, which links Portugal and Spain to South Africa, with connections to several West African countries along the way, was hit by a breakdown near Libreville, Gabon in January. In addition, Wacs, which links South Africa with the United Kingdom, also saw an outage off the coast of Congo at the time.

(Compiled by Kaunda Selisho and Charles Cilliers)

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