South Africans witnessed the extent of the country’s dependency on the undersea internet cables connecting the country to the Web when it experienced a national Internet outage, leaving thousands of businesses and individuals without Internet access.
And, until the cables are fully repaired, South African users whose Internet connectivity depends on these cables may experience further interruptions says Dr Marten Scheffer, GM: network engineering at Neotel.
Scheffer claims that no Neotel customers have been impacted by the cable faults that started on Thursday. “This is due to the exceptional resilience and routing redundancy of Neotel’s IP network.”
Dr Angus Hays, GM: Africa ISP & SA ISP at Neotel, adds that ISPs, businesses and end-users need to look into the resilience of their global Internet providers to ensure that they experience minimal downtime when undersea cable interruptions strike.
“Not all Internet providers are equal and Neotel delivers Internet directly into South Africa via all five undersea cables on a Tier 1 network that spans the globe,” Dr Hays says.
Scheffer adds that Neotel’s capacity planning and engineering also helps to ensure that there is adequate capacity on each cable in case of failures.
“In addition, when such a fault occurs our dynamic network planning automatically reroutes traffic to the shortest available path,” he says.
