Gateway reroutes during SEACOM outage
Gateway Communications, the leading supplier of African telecommunications services, today announced that it was once again the only carrier on SEACOM operational in many East and Southern African countries following an outage on the sub-sea cable on 4 June.
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. There was, however, a major unscheduled outage affecting a portion of SEACOM’s transmission network that lasted a number of hours on 4 June, causing widespread disruption to services.
Gateway Communications, which was one of the anchor tenants on SEACOM, operates 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 midday on 4 June, Gateway had already re-routed all IP transits and connections over the SAT-3 cable, which travels from South Africa along the Western side of Africa up to Europe. As a result, Gateway’s customers experienced minimal or no disruption due to Friday’s outage.
As in the previous case a month or so ago, when SEACOM was taken down to repair a fault in the Mediterranean, Gateway took the decision to re-route its customers over alternate fibre capacity at its own cost. Although many other operators decided to claim ‘unavoidable outage’, Gateway understands the financial impact and reputational damage that its customers face when they have no access to international fibre-based services for any period of time, and so moved swiftly to alleviate the problem, thereby providing the most reliable and dependable service available to countries connected to the SEACOM cable.