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- Only one cable-laying ship is allowed to tackle repairs needed to the broken undersea fibre-optic cable segments in the Congo Canyon.
- The snapped cables are causing internet disruptions in South Africa.
- But the Léon Thévenin is carrying out repairs near Kenya on the east coast of Africa – more than 8 000 kilometres away - before it heads to the Congo Canyon.
- For more stories, visit the Tech and Trends homepage.
The only underwater cable-laying ship authorised to tackle the repair of undersea cables in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa is still more than 8 000 kilometres away from the site where two cables, critical to the provision of internet services in South Africa, snapped on the same day.
The Léon Thévenin is just off the coast of Kenya, on the east coast of Africa. The West Africa Cable System (WACS) and the South Atlantic Telecommunications Cable number three (SAT-3) snapped on the west coast of Africa, off the coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
News24 had a look at the position of the ship on Marine Traffic, a maritime analytics provider, and saw that it was still located off the coast of Kenya, where it is involved in another marine repair.
The repair vessel will have to make the more than 8 000-kilometre journey around the southern tip of the continent.
The two underwater fibre-optic cables snapped on 6 August, allegedly due to a rockfall in the Congo Canyon.
Various companies in South Africa and along the west coast of the continent rely on the cables for internet services.
Since the cables play a crucial role in enabling the rapid transfer of information across long distances, internet disruptions have been experienced.
David Belson, the head of data insight at Cloudflare, one of the biggest networks operating on the internet, said websites hosted in the US or Europe may feel slow or not work at all in South Africa because of the break.
"This will make websites feel slower, or just not work at all. Networks are actively working on bringing up new capacity to deal with the cut, while work is under way to repair the break, which may take weeks to repair," Belson said.
No alternatives
Jess Auerbach, an associate professor at the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business, who is in the process of writing a book about fibrer-optic cables, said the Léon Thévenin was the only ship authorised to tend to the subsea cables of sub-Saharan Africa.
READ NOW | Expect internet disruptions in SA as two undersea cables snapped on same day
There are other ships for repairs to subsea cables, according to Auerbach, but there are legal arrangements and cost factors involved, which mean that they can't be used for the repairs on many African cable segments, including the portion of WACS and SAT-3 that are damaged.
Thus, the companies that rent capacity on WACS and SAT-3 will have to wait for the Léon Thévenin to finish its current job and travel to the Congo Canyon.
In the meantime, many companies have been able to reroute the traffic that would normally be serviced on the WACS and SAT-3 cables to other subsea cables.
The repair
Auerbach explained that the process that will likely be followed to repair the cables once the ship has made the voyage to the DRC.
The Léon Thévenin has a remote-controlled submersible on board which will be deployed to retrieve the cable from the sea floor.
READ MORE | Vodacom, MTN, Openserve work to minimise impact of undersea cable breaks on operations
The subsea cables look a little bit like a garden hosepipe and contain many high-quality glass threads that can carry vast quantities of information very quickly over long distances. These threads are encased in other materials.
Once the cable is above water, there is a team of skilled technicians on board the vessel who will assess the work that needs to be done, and the damaged cable section will be repaired on the ship.
Africa underserved
In recent months, Google and Meta have landed new subsea cables on South African shores that run along the west coast of the continent.
READ MORE | Google's undersea cable lands in Melkbosstrand – promising cheaper, faster internet for SA
Auerbach said that the number of cables around the continent was increasing rapidly, which means that more breaks in the cables can be expected.
This means that the lack of repair infrastructure and maintenance skills may need to be reconsidered going forward, she added.
She said:
"There is a lack of available infrastructure at the levels of repairs and maintenance," said Auerbach.
She said that the lack of capacity to deal with cable breaks was driven by the lack of the repair ships themselves, a shortage of expertise and the legal structures that need to be in place to undertake repairs.
The vessels are very expensive pieces of infrastructure, she said.
Wait time
Vodacom spokesperson Byron Kennedy, said WACS and SAT-3 were expected to be repaired by 8 September, "weather permitting".
Until then, South Africans might experience some internet complication, especially during peak usage times.
