The East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) which was recently damaged will be back on line in about two weeks, it has emerged. It is suspected that on February 17, a cargo ship dragged its anchor over a distance of 150km in the Red Sea between Djibouti and Port Sudan, damaging three undersea cables; the EASSy; the South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3 (SMW3); and the Europe-India Gateway (EIG).“The EASSy and EIG cables are likely to be repaired by March 20th. A cable ship has been secured to undertake the repair. Actual repair dates will depend on a variety of factors, including sea and weather conditions in the region,” Chris Wood, the Chairman of the EASSy Management Committee, told The New Times in an email yesterday.“The SMW3 cable is due to be repaired by March 12th; this will restore most of the affected traffic on a direct path to Europe,” he added.Wood stated that EASSy’s “collapsed ring” protection mechanism minimised the impact of the damage. The only services interrupted by the cut cable were those either originating or terminating in Port Sudan, or those using Port Sudan to connect to other systems for transit to Europe. “Most of the Africa to Europe traffic affected by damage to SMW3 and EIG has already been re-routed onto other systems, both in Djibouti and via South Africa - thus minimising the end user impact,” Wood noted.The cable disruptions, detected between Port Sudan and Djibouti which carries the majority of international Internet traffic (80 percent), also affected MTN Rwanda, the country’s biggest telecom company by subscriber base.”EASSY outage could have affected our clients if MTN hadn’t invested in redundant routes. As a result, MTN didn’t experience a total outage,” MTN Rwanda’s Chief Technical Officer, Maher Maarouf, revealed.According to Maarouf, apart from EASSY, the company is also connected to TEAMS, SEACOM, Telecom-Italia, SEA-ME-WE-3 and New-Artel.Speaking to The New Times, Jean Claude Munyangabo, the Director of Administration and Finance at New Artel, said that his company gets internet via Satellite and Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL), a local infrastructure connected to EASSy cable.“We were affected by the breakdown of EASSy but we have redundancy, we were backed up by Satellite connection which we are currently depending on for internet connection,” he said.
