South Africa: P2P Control Helps Overcome Undersea Cable Outage

  
James Etherington-Smith reports to mybroadband on the current status of South Africa international traffic.
 

SEACOM Cable Coverage

 "The SEACOM undersea cable, which provides a data link between South Africa, Europe and India, experienced downtime beginning on Saturday 8 October 2011, caused by a problem on a cable between Abu Talat (Egypt) and Marseilles (France) .. Meanwhile, local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) who use bandwidth on the SEACOM cable have been scrambling to implement contingency plans to keep their customers connected".

According to an MWEB update (here) - “Some more bandwidth was brought online last night [10 October 2011] bringing us up to 83% of our required capacity. We allowed P2P traffic to run from midnight to 7am, after which it had to give way for critical traffic again.”

As MWEB also uses PeerApp's caching solution (here), it may help serve some P2P traffic without accessing the undersea cable.

See "MWEB updates customers on SEACOM downtime" - here.