The East African Internet Outage

In February, a ship dragging its anchor 5 Km off the coast of the Kenyan port city of Mombasa damaged The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable severely degrading the Internet and International telephony services in East Africa region. Among the countries that were affected include Kenya, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Tanzania and South Sudan. In a separate incidence, 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) several days before.

Though the impact on the EaSSy cable was minimal, since traffic on EASSy exits Africa through Djibouti, the cut presents a similar challenge to the one on TEAMS – restoration timeline. Both EASSy and TEAMS had indicated a restoration timeline of up to three weeks. The outage significantly affected business operations for most companies and organizations in East Africa, mostly due to their dependence on accessibility of fast and reliable Internet. Among the multinational companies operating in the region include Google, Microsoft, IBM and Samsung. Local companies that run e-commerce applications and other platforms that depend on the Internet were hugely affected.

The two submarines cables, TEAMS and EaSSy, were completed in July 2010 and September 2009 respectively to link the East African region to the rest of the world. The TEAMS cable was originally designed to have a capacity of 1.28 terabit per second (Tbit/s) while EASSy is the highest capacity system serving sub-Saharan Africa, with a 4.72 terabit per second (Tbit/s) design capacity. SEACOM on the hand has a design capacity of 1.28 terabit per second (Tbit/s), theoretically not enough to support both TEAMS design capacity. Important to note is that the design capacities are utilized as the demand for Internet capacity from the shareholders grows. With the three submarine cables at the coast of East Africa, there were still intermittent interruptions of Internet service and in some instances total outage. Which begs the question, can we provide better redundancy to the submarines cables in the region?

Comparing the submarines cable in East Africa to those in other parts of Africa, the West African region has far much more capacity and a variety of submarine cables than the East. The West Africa Cable System (WACS) and the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE) both a design capacities of 5.12 terabit per second (Tbit/s) while Globacom-1 (GLO-1) has a design capacity of 2.5 terabit per second (Tbit/s). Would these capacities provide a better redundant solution to the submarine cable in the East? What about running a terrestrial intra-Africa cable interconnecting the East to the West? Would this alleviate the challenges faced in the month of February? It would. Submarine cables landing in sub-Saharan Africa currently reach 37.4 million people within a 25-km range of landing stations, equivalent to 4.4% of the total population. Africa’s terrestrial fibre optic networks reach some 259.3 million people within a 25-km range of operational fibre nodes, 30.8% of the population.

Apart from providing redundancy and additional capacity to the submarine cables, an East to West intra-Africa terrestrial cable would provide high capacity links for traffic between the East and West African countries and enhance trade relations and commerce opportunities, already were showing by the entrance of West Africa banks and Telecos into the East African market. Currently, most terrestrial cables in Africa are within countries to distribute capacity inland and are rarely used to interconnect countries. The central African region barely has terrestrial cables and would serve as a bargaining point for running an East to West intra-African terrestrial cable. The cost of such a project would be the major inhibitant, not forgetting political conflict in some of the countries.

An example of an effective terrestrial cable is the TEA Transit Europe-Asia (TEA) terrestrial cable network between Europe and Asia via the territory of Russia. Recognizing the need that many corporations have to diversify their international networks from the traditional trans-pacific submarine cables connecting their Asian and USA/European offices, the TEA terrestrial cable systems were built between China and Europe in 2004. The Asian segment of the TEA terrestrial cable network runs over; the territory of China via cross border interconnections between Rostelecom and its Chinese partners (China Telecom and China Unicom); the territory of Japan via the Russia-Japan Submarine Cable Network (RJCN) constructed by Rostelecom and KDDI and terrestrial cable between Russia and Kazakhstan reaching Central Asia countries.