Disruption to internet connectivity expected for the day |23 January 2018

The Seychelles Cable Systems, which owns and operates the Seychelles East Africa Systems (SEAS), has announced a disruption to local internet connectivity which will last until late afternoon today.

This was confirmed by the chairperson of the Seychelles Cable Systems (SCS), Benjamin Choppy, who explained that the outage in the services of the SEAS submarine cable is due to civil works being undertaken by the municipality of Dar-Es-Salaam in Tanzania.

“There is a land segment of the SEAS cable in Dar-Es-Salaam that goes inland to the cable landing station and the civil work is expected to occur along this area where our cable is located,” Mr Choppy explained.

With these civil works posing an immediate threat to the SEAS cable, which would then result into a more severe connectivity outage, SCS decided to divert the cable segment to a new duct route as a precautionary measure.

“It is better to have a planned outage rather than a sudden, unexpected interruption on the cable,” Mr Choppy asserted.

The landing party in Tanzania have been mobilised to start the re-routing work during the early hours of today and the task is expected to be completed by this afternoon, assuming there are no unforeseen events.

Mr Choppy added that today was ideally chosen so that the country can have full internet access before work and other activities resume on Monday.

The SEAS undersea fibre optic cable provides Seychelles with over 90% of its internet traffic with the rest being provided by satellites.

There are currently three telecommunication service providers that take their bandwidth capacity from the SEAS cable: Cable & Wireless Seychelles (CWS), AIRTEL and Intelvision.

Artur Lo Pinto, the manager for marketing, communications and public relation at CWS, said that all their internet related services will be disrupted including several channels on their cable TV service.

Mr Lo Pinto further stated that the “very severe disruption” will not affect roaming services, voice calls on mobile and landlines or their SMS services.

“This is of course a question of international maintenance and beyond the control of CWS,” he clarified.

In similar vein, Intelvision’s chief operating officer, Reza Jaro, stated that the company has already informed its subscribers of the lack in internet access as well as disturbance to some of its channels.