Zimbabwean internet hit by ship accidents
By Solomon Moore
NAIROBI—Undersea data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe were severed in two separate shipping accidents this month, causing telecommunications outages in at least nine countries and affecting millions of Internet and phone users, telecom executives and government officials said.
A ship dragging its anchor off the coast of the Kenyan port city of Mombasa severed a crucial Internet and phone link for the region Saturday, crippling electronic communications from Zimbabwe to Djibouti, according to a public-private consortium that owns the undersea cable.
The Indian Ocean fiber-optic cable, known as The East African Marine Systems, or Teams, is owned by a group of telecom companies and the Kenyan government. It was the fourth cable to be severed in the region since Feb. 17.
The Teams cable had been rerouting data from three other cables severed 10 days ago in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East. Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second and form the backbone of East Africa’s telecom infrastructure.
Telecom companies were reeling over the weekend as engineers attempted to reroute data south along the East African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope.
“It’s a very unusual situation,” said Chris Wood, chief executive of West Indian Ocean Cable Co., the largest shareholder of the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System, or Eassy, and a major owner of data-capacity rights on the two other Red Sea cables. “I believe these were accidental incidents, although more will be known when we bring the cables up from the sea bed.”
Mr. Wood said the Eassy cable, the Europe India Gateway (EIG) and the South East Asia Middle East Western Europe-3 (SMW-3) cables were all severed at the same time about 650 feet below the Red Sea. The cables were all severed far out to sea, but Mr. Wood said that a passing ship could have caused the damage because the Red Sea is unusually shallow.
He said cable ships would repair the Red Sea cables within about three weeks. Joel Tanui, general manager of Teams, said plans also were under way to fix the Mombasa cable.
“We wish to notify all our stakeholders of ongoing emergency repair works and apologize unreservedly for any inconvenience this may cause,” Mr. Tanui said. “The cable should be fully operational within the next three weeks.”
The repair operation will use remote-controlled submarines to survey the damage and lift the cables to the ocean surface. Engineers will then splice the cables and repair them in sanitized rooms aboard cable ships.
Each submarine fiber-optic cable is typically composed of about four strands, each one the diameter of a human hair and sheathed in a thick steel armor. The strands are capable of carrying millions of phone calls and data connections at once.
The first submarine fiber-optic cables were activated in East Africa in 2009 and since then Internet speeds and cellular coverage have increased dramatically alongside an explosion in e-commerce. Telecom firms like Safaricom and Africa Online are now among the most prominent companies in sub-Saharan Africa. The Wall Street Journal
