Making Seychelles’ global connectivity more resilient |08 March 2013

The total International bandwidth available to Seychelles now (bandwidth commercially in operation) has more than tripled since Seychelles was connected to the submarine cable system and this has occurred in less than six months.

Almost 76% (and set to grow higher) of the total bandwidth available to the country through the telecom operators is now being provided via the submarine cable. The two operators presently using SEAS are Cable & Wireless Seychelles (CWS) and Airtel Seychelles (AS).

Over the last months, the two Internet Service Providers (ISP), CWS and AS, that are connected to the international submarine cable system have confirmed that there have been multiple interruptions in their service via the cable system. These have been mainly due to planned maintenance work or interruption of traffic on onward connectivity cable systems in Dar-Es-Salam and beyond (primarily in Egypt). In some of these instances these two operators have had to resort to re-routing their traffic over satellite. Consequently, in many of these cases, their customers have suffered in terms of quality of service, especially in relation to internet usage when compared to service when their traffic is via the submarine cable.

Following the spate of these interruptions, the Department of Information Communications Technology (DICT) has taken up the matter with the concerned operators. One of the measures that DICT has discussed with these operators, in order to reduce the occurrences where the quality of service of Internet is impaired, is to have diversity on the onward connectivity from Dar-Es-Salaam. From the discussions, it was established that both operators were routing their traffic from Dar-Es-Salaam to Europe using the same submarine cable systems for their onward connectivity (essentially both were using one path only for their traffic).

As a positive development, DICT now notes that both operators have either completed or in the process of implementing full diversity from Dar-Es-Salaam onwards. This means that their traffic from Seychelles on SEAS will now have available at least two different cable systems from Dar-Es-Salaam onwards on which they can be routed on. In this scenario, in the event of failure or interruption on the system which is in use, the traffic will be automatically routed to the other cable system. It is therefore expected that as a result of this implementation by these operators, their traffic will be less prone to interruptions as a result of issues relating to  cable systems used for onward connectivity of their traffic.

Contributed