Teraco and Seacom work double time internet crisis

Lex van Wyk, Teraco's CEO, said that the benefits of hosting in a vendor-neutral data centre was highlighted this week when the facility was able swiftly to connect the likes of MWeb, Cell C and others following the outage.

"With Seacom located close to their clients in the data centre, we were easily able to connect them to a different Seacom routing environment to give them additional capacity."

Teraco is the most connected data centre facility in Africa already offering connectivity to major international service providers, who have network connectivity on SAT3/SAFE, Seacom, EASSY and WACS; mobile carriers including Vodacom, MTN and Cell C; local carriers including Telkom, Neotel and Broadband Infraco and fibre infrastructure provider, Dark Fibre Africa and many more.

No last-mile replacement is required

Claes Segelberg, CTO of Seacom said: "The benefits of being in a neutral data centre like Teraco and close to our clients means that no last-mile replacement is required in the event of an outage. We've also been able to work with partners like Teraco to identify solutions swiftly, to give our clients additional capacity in situations like we've faced over the past couple of days."

To implement this restoration, the Seacom team had to identify, negotiate and sign contracts to establish multiple paths across the Mediterranean on cable systems that were unaffected by the recent cable cuts. Additionally, once these routing paths were chosen, cross-connects at the Egypt and Marseille terminals had to be manually coupled by teams deployed at both sites.