Kenya said on Monday it has successfully repaired the East African Marine System (TEAMS) cable which was damaged last month and severely disrupted East Africa’s high-speed internet services.The cut which occurred at the Kenyan coast damaged a crucial link for the bulk of internet and international voice traffic in the East Africa region. The damaged occurred after a ship dropped its anchor onto the cables in the Kenyan coastal city of Mombasa.The incident happened on Feb. 25 when the said shipped illegally anchored at the point where both TEAMS and the Eastern African Submarine Cable System (EASSY) land into the country.“Due to several undersea cable cuts around the same period (EASSY, EIG, SMW3, TEAMS), the submarine cable maintenance company had a lot of challenges coping with the unusual workload,” TEAMS’ General Manager Joel Tanui said in a statement issued in Nairobi.“We were lucky to be allocated a cable ship that was just completing routine service at dry docks, Dubai. The repair cable ship arrived at Mombasa at midnight 20th March 2012 and immediately started the work the following day,” said the statement.The cut saw Internet in the country through most providers inaccessible for several more than ten days while the few providers that had access to the net saw their traffic slowing to almost a crawl.Tanui said the repair works were successfully completed on Saturday ahead of the planned repair time of midnight of Sunday. A landmark public-private partnership, TEAMS is the premier undersea cable system serving the entire East African region.Besides the Kenyan government, the other shareholders in the TEAMS consortium include Safaricom, Jamii Telecom, Wananchi, Essar, Kenya Data Networks, Access Kenya, Telkom Orange and Bandwidth & Cloud Services.“We are deeply grateful for the patience that our TEAMS consortium members and all our customers showed during this time,” Tanui said.It is estimated that the repairs of the cable, including costs for temporary traffic restoration via other cables during the TEAMS cable outage is about 6 million U.S. dollars, excluding loss of business as a result of heavily constrained bandwidth.Kenya’s largest mobile operator, Safaricom which serves about 80 per cent of the Internet in the country and Wananchi connects to the TEAMS cable while Orange connects via EASSY.About eight data operators have been affected and have also been looking at redundant routes. Affected operators include Safaricom, Airtel and Wananchi’s Zuku.However, Safaricom managed to re-rout its connection to SEACOM cable and satellite to keep its customers connected. This is the time the cable has been cut in the sea since it was laid three years ago. TEAMS was a project initiated by the Kenyan government and implemented as a public private partnership consisting mostly of Kenyan network operators.The 1.3 Terabit system, which launched with a lit capacity of 120 Gigabits has completely transformed the quality and performance of Internet services in the sub-region.Immediate efforts to seek backup services from SEACOM, another submarine cable that serves the region as well as backup satellite connections resulted in partial restoration of services in the country. The cable which links Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa to Fujairah in the Middle East, interconnects with a variety of other International submarine cable systems to link Africa’s eastern seaboard to the rest of the world.Experts say this is the first major incident will be a true test of the fault response and repair capabilities of Alcatel, the organization that holds the maintenance and support contract for TEAMs.
