Cable cut slows down South Africa’s internet speed
South African internet users working from home during the Covid-19 lockdown may be experiencing slow internet due to the cable break.
The operating partner of the South African national research and education network (SA NREN) has confirmed that the West Africa Cable System (WACS) capacity is down since late last night (27 March).
Tenet, the operating partner of SA NREN tweeted that they suspected the cause of the outage to be a cable between Highbridge London and Seixal Portugal optical time-domain reflectometer (OTDR). Tests were conducted and a complete cable cut was found on segment 4 at 39.0175km from SV8 Cable Landing Station (CLS).
WACS Outage: Complete cable cut on segment 4 at 39.0175Km from SV8 Cable Landing Station (CLS). Waiting for confirmation whether SV8 CLS is on the UK or Portugal side or whether this is a terrestrial versus sub-sea break.
— (Discontinued)SA NREN Operational Updates & Alerts (@RENAlerts) March 28, 2020
In a tweet, SA NREN explained that the continued outages on the east coast will affect South African internet users working from home during the Covid-19 lockdown, as they may experience issues if their home internet service providers do not have sufficient capacity via alternate sub-sea cable systems.
According to a report by MyBroadband, internet service provider Afrihost has acknowledged the cable break as a ‘high impact’ event on its status page. Afrihost said, “We are aware that there are current problems with international traffic. This is due to problems on the cables we make use of to send and receive international traffic.”
Afrihost added that their engineers are attending to the problem and hope the matter will be resolved soon.
