The West African Cable System (Wacs) has suffered another break undersea issuing another blow to the country’s moral and arriving at the worst possible time. South African internet users will suffer slow speeds, high latency and a few disconnection issues over the next week while repair work is done on the internet cable break.
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According to Tenet, the break took place at 01:28 am South African time this morning as a call was logged after traffic failed over to Seacom and the Eassy cable systems. This internet cable break is not at the same place as the one that took place earlier this year off the coast off West Africa and Europe. Instead, this break is between Highbridge in the UK and Seixal in Portugal.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#E8ED0F” class=”” size=”21″]“With the WACS and continued SAT-3 outages on the east coast, SANREN users working from home during the lockdown may experience issues if their home providers do not have sufficient capacity via alternate sub-sea cable systems,”[/perfectpullquote]
But there is some good news at least. Unlike the past break that took almost two months to get repaired, this one is estimated to be fixed by 2 April 2020 with a cable vessel currently already on-site repairing the break.
Afrihost released a statement claiming that users may suffer from a degraded internet experience due to the issue. This will mainly affect Openserve South African internet customers.
[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”#E8ED0F” class=”” size=”21″]“Openserve is currently experiencing degrade performance on the WACS portion of their international cabling. The degraded performance is being compounded due to SAT3 also being down.This problem is causing increased latency and slow speeds when accessing international servers and data. Engineers are attending to the problem and hope to have it resolved soon.”[/perfectpullquote]
Hang in there, South Africa.
