Gateway Communications, a leading supplier of African telecommunications services, today announced that it was once again the only carrier operational in many East and Southern African countries following an outage on the SEACOM cable on 4 June.
The cable, that runs from Europe, along the East Coast of Africa to South Africa, was launched last year and hailed as the provider of high-speed African connectivity. There was, however, a major unscheduled outage affecting a portion of SEACOM’s transmission network that lasted a number of hours on 4 June, causing widespread disruption to services.
Gateway Communications, which was one of the anchor tenants on SEACOM, operates a fully redundant MPLS network on SEACOM and is the only company able to offer MPLS services at any point or end-to-end on the cable. By midday on 4 June, Gateway had already re-routed all IP transits and connections over the SAT-3 cable, which travels from South Africa along the Western side of Africa up to Europe. As a result, Gateway’s customers experienced minimal or no disruption due to Friday’s outage.
As in the previous case a month or so ago, when SEACOM was taken down to repair a fault in the Mediterranean, Gateway took the decision to re-route its customers over alternate fibre capacity at its own cost.
