You weren’t mistaken; the internet speeds were slow over the weekend for a valid reason.
The recent sluggish internet speeds in South Africa can be attributed to the occurrence of two subsea broadband cable breaks – one on Wacs and the other on Sat-3.
The reported cause of the breaks was a rock fall within the Congo Canyon.
It appears that the breaks occurred between Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as measured by the system’s Coherent Optical Time Domain Reflectometer.
The Sat-3 was cut on Sunday morning, while WACS went down later that evening. They have reportedly mobilized the cable laying ship Leon Thevenin for the deep water repairs on the cables.
However, Marine Traffic reports that the vessel arrived in Mombasa, Kenya yesterday after a 10-day journey from Cape Town, making a rapid repair unlikely.
Up until recently, the fracture of two underwater cables would have resulted in limited global internet access for South African users.
However, modern, high-capacity cables have been constructed in recent times, offering significantly increased bandwidth through diverse pathways. As a result, when an outage occurs, the repercussions are now less severe.
Telkom has stated that the impact on its network is “limited to customers on the international private leased-circuit services”.
“The Openserve network remains robust due to our investment in other international cable capacity, hence all Openserve IP transit services traffic has been automatically rerouted, ensuring our customers stay seamlessly connected. No official restoration timeline has been communicated by the consortium.”
It is hoped the issue will be resolved quickly and efficiently, restoring internet service to all those affected within a short amount of time.