NAIROBI - SEACOM says that repairs for its faulty undersea cable line between Mumbai and Mombasa will only be finalised by July 22, having originally gone down on July 5.

The cable connects South Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Mozambique to Europe and Asia.

Initial reports indicated that the overall repair process could take 6-8 days.

"Current investigations indicate that a repeater has failed on segment 9 of the SEACOM cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombasa. This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected,” SEACOM said.

It said it had continued to work closely with its partners to deploy the best plan possible for the repair operations.

"As communicated earlier, the exogenous factors such as location, water depth, weather and spare parts needed make this cable outage very difficult to repair and a highly specialised vessel and technical crew is being used to carry out this work.

"Based on this, the current timeline indicates that the repairs may now only be finalised by July 22, 2010,” SEACOM said.

The group said it would also continue to source and activate additional capacity to meet customer requirements for the duration of the repairs.

Internet service provider, MWEB said on Friday that it had restored all of its international bandwidth and was running at full capacity.

MWEB, which relies on SEACOM’s cable for its services, said it had worked very closely with its bandwidth provider to ensure the stability of its network while identifying alternative options to secure additional redundancy.

MWEB said Telkom’s SAT3 cable had ensured some redundancy, which was used primarily to re-route email traffic.

Derek Hershaw, MWEB ISP CEO said: "While SEACOM continues with the repairs of the cable fault, we have in the interim secured full capacity split over two separate routes. SEACOM’s restoration process is expected to be completed later next week.

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