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- An undersea cable, which snapped a month ago, was fixed.
- It should bring relief for internet users in South Africa.
- However, more cable repairs are required.
- For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage.
The West African Cable System (WACS) undersea cable has been repaired a month after it snapped off the coast of the Congo.
A spokesperson for Vodacom, Byron Kennedy, said the WACS cable was repaired on Tuesday, while an Openserve statement said the repair would be completed by the end of 6 September.
The South Atlantic 3 (SAT-3) cable, which snapped on the same day, still has to be repaired.
The network of thin undersea fibre-optic cables, which run for thousands of kilometres under the sea, is crucial for the internet to function because it allows for the rapid transfer of information across long distances.
MTN, Vodacom, Openserve and Cloudflare told News24 there were some disruptions from the cable break on their operations, but said they were able to mitigate the impact of the breaks in many cases by rerouting traffic onto other subsea cables.
READ MORE | Vodacom, MTN, Openserve work to minimise impact of undersea cable breaks on operations
The CEO of Openserve, Althon Beukes, said customers' latency would be restored when the cable fix was complete.
"The team has made remarkable progress and, although the impact on Openserve was limited due to our investment in other international cable capacity, the restoration will reinstate our customers' latency and redundancy on the WACS cable," said Beukes.
Underserved
When the cables snapped, the only vessel licensed to repair that portion of the cables was busy with repair work on the other side of the continent.
The Léon Thévenin is the only cable ship authorised to tend to the subsea cables of Sub-Saharan Africa, Jess Auerbach told News24 last month.
Auerbach is an associate professor at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business, who is in the process of writing a book on fibre-optic cables.
READ MORE | Only one cable-laying ship can fix snapped underwater cables and it's still on the other side of Africa
"At the moment, I think it fair to say that Africa is radically underserved," she said.
The number of undersea cables running in Africa has increased in recent years, meaning that the frequency of cable breaks is expected to increase, explained Auerbach.
Google's Equiano cable landed in Melkbosstrand in August last year and Meta's 2Africa also recently landed.
Auerbach said that, going forward, the resources authorised to operate in Sub-Saharan Africa for subsea cable maintenance and repair may need to be reconsidered.
Auerbach praised the crew of the Léon Thévenin for operating skillfully to repair the cable.
"To repair the cables so quickly, the crew would have had to work exceptionally skillfully in difficult conditions," she said.
