Safaricom has acquired additional internet capacity from other undersea cable providers following Sunday’s undersea cable cuts that affected some of its services.
- To resume the full potential of its internet services, Safaricom said it is closely working with impacted undersea cable suppliers for a faster resolution of the repair works.
- A deep-sea fibre cut occurred on the Mtunzini teleport station, affecting a number of submarine cable serving Kenya, including Seacom and the East African Submarine System (Eassy).
- The East African Marine System (TEAMS) cable, which has not been affected by the cut, is currently being utilized for local traffic flow while redundancy on the South Africa route has been activated to minimize the impact.
“We note and appreciate efforts made by mobile network operators and internet service providers to restore internet services and keep the country connected through the acquisition of additional capacity in other undersea fibre cables,” said David Mugonyi, the Director General Communications Authority of Kenya said.
“While this has led to near normal services, the backlog generated by the outage might take some time to clear.”
According to connectivity-tracking website, Cloudflare Radar, internet outages in Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar were severely affected as their traffic volume declined to 30 per cent. Other countries in the region that also experienced slow internet connectivity include Rwanda and Uganda.
This network interruption is months away from a similar disruption that happened along the West African coast when undersea cables were cut. While East Africa remained unaffected at the time, the occurrence spurred conversation about the future of Africa’s internet infrastructure.
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