Gateway Communications keeps East and Southern Africa connected during SEACOM outage

28 April 2010

Gateway Communications, announced that it is the only carrier on SEACOM currently operational in many East and Southern African countries following an outage on the sub-sea cable.

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. However, last week it announced that it was experiencing an interruption in its network on the Mediterranean section of the SEA-MEWE 4 submarine cable system, which SEACOM currently utilises to connect to London.

Scheduled repair work over the weekend meant that all Internet Service Providers on the SEACOM cable would experience disconnections, as well as the many mobile phone operators who use the cable for their IP capacity. Although repairs were expected to be concluded quickly, as of Tuesday many customers in Eastern and Southern Africa are still experiencing problems.

Gateway Communications has 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 Friday last week Gateway had already re-routed all IP transits and connections through the SAT-3 cable which travels from South Africa along the Western side of Africa up to Europe. As a result, Gateway customers have experienced no disruption and Gateway is one of the few carriers operational in South Africa and the only carrier that uses SEACOM operational in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania.

Commenting on the situation, Silvio do Carmo, Gateway Communications’ Business Development Director, Wholesale said, “When such an outage occurs, the cost to businesses and inconvenience to customers is great and as such, we decided to re-route our connections at our own cost. Although many other operators decided to claim ‘unavoidable outage’, connecting Africa is what we do, even when the chips are down.”