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Both the SAT-3 and WACS undersea cable were damaged Jan 16, 2020. The cable systems are deployed in the Atlantic Ocean and connect various African countries to Europe – including South Afric. According to reports, the issue with the SAT-3 is believed to have been located near Libreville, Gabon. WACs meanwhile is believed to have suffered two faults one of the coast of congo Congo and another near the UK. This affected more than a dozen countries besides South Africa. This left many South Africans with slow Internet connections to international websites. a. That leaves Africa Coast to Coast (ACE) and Equiano providing access to Europe and beyond and SAFE providing access via India and Malaysia and the South Africa Express (SAEx2) which will provide access via India and Malaysia in 2021.
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Cables going East to Europe
| EASSY RFS 2010 July | SEACOM/Tata TGN-Eurasia RFS 2009 July |
|---|---|
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Cables going East to India and Malaysia are shown below.
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RFS = Ready For Service so the current backups to Europe and probably the US are ACE going West and possibly SAFE SAFECOM both going East.
Result as observed by PingER
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One can also look at the various statistics for both Average RTT, losses and minimum RTTs, see below (the spreadsheet is seen here). The Average and Losses are heavily influenced by the congestion. The minimum is mainly influenced by the route change or change in the distance of the cable route. Also note that the impact on the minimum RTT is not seen until Jan 17th since some of the PingER January 16 measurements were made before the change of cables used. It is also worth noting as reported in ieee "TENET restored its overseas connections by switching to an alternative 80-gigabit-per-second service on the SEACOM and EASSy cables on Africa's east coast. '"The latency ... increased due to this failover, but there are currently no reported issues of this being detrimental to connectivity," a representative of TENET said on 30 January."'
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Traceroute
The route measured 19:00 hrs 1/28/2020 PST from SLAC to South Africa goes East across the US via Chicago, Washington to London and thence S. Africa:
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AS3671 is ESnet and AS2018 is TENET
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ieee Submarine Cable Repairs Underway in South Africa. IEEESpectrum, 3 February 2020, see https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/internet/undersea-cable-repairs-south-africa