TEAMS is down yet again. According to Teams admin there is a cable cut in the submerged section of the TEAMS cable approximately 5.3 Km from Mombasa Landing Station. So Someone or something has cut the cable and as usual it will take sometime before it is repaired. And here comes the time for excuses from ISPs..and pain for Kenyans. The better part of the day today, most Kenyans were left on the darkness without internet. The ISPs as usual promise what they can not deliver. Actually the excuse they have had for keeping the prices high is that they have invested heavily on the multiple cables and thus they need time recoup their investment. For a country with four cables, and using only around 20 Gigabits per second (1Gbps), there should never be an internet problem in Kenya even for a minute
- TEAMS fiber optic cable has capacity of 1.28 Tb/s
- Seacom fiber optic cable has capacity of 1.28 Tb/s
- EASSy fiber optic cable has capacity of 4.72 Tb/s
- LION 2 has capacity of 1.28 Tb/s
Ok, let say that the minute I am talking about is too short. For those in the know how long does it take to switch to the alternative cable..or the so called redundancy capacity? Or may be the right question I should be asking is did these ISPs really made the heavy investments on the different cables for redundancy capacity they keep on talking about?
According to Wikipedia ..
“In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components or functions of a system with the intention of increasing reliability of the system, usually in the case of a backup or fail-safe.
So it is simply like buying Orange and Safaricom data at the same time but using one and switching to the other one in case the one you are using has a problem.. How long does that take?
How long does it take to sign commercial papers for a 10 STM-1 redundant/stand-by link vis-a-vis configuring a BGP failover between the Primary and secondary? I would like to know whether’s there’s an ISP in the world who would afford to have such redundancy and if so, what it’s data charges to customers are like.
Ok..I know you an expert on this, so what do we have in Kenya? When ISPs talk about investing in cables for the redundancy capacity what do they mean?
When push comes to shove, in business, you have to place priorities. What are my mission-critical services: Banking, Money transfer or Facebook traffic? You then proceed to put more investment on what you believe are your top priorities.
Being in a 3rd world country, I am not surprised.
That just goes to show you how ridiculously easy it is to sabotage this country. Take out Kenya Power sub-stations and communications, it will take us back to the stone ages
:) The headline of this article’s sister reads, “Yes TEAMs is down and it is time for complaints and whining from Kenyans”
OPTION 1
Is the Internet really that important to you? If so, invest in a link with an ISP that goes the Satellite way so you can reduce the number of hops (and fiber cable which inexplicably gets cuts while we were promised it would be indestructible … no? Oh wait …) between you and that oh so glorious basket of porn.
OPTION 2
Is the Internet important to you but not important enough for you to want to invest in something that will most likely determine whether you close that important business deal or not? Invest in some cheap-ass Internet that goes for less than a DSTV connection (DSTV mwitu even).
MORAL OF THE STORY
1. Value doesn’t come cheap.
2. Where value (more like quantity) comes cheap, you either put up or shut up.
bottom line… ISPs should not preach water and drink wine.
what is missing is end to end redundancy (a major FAIL!!!). the core network might have redundancy but the transmission doesn’t, the transmission network might have redundancy but the backbone doesn’t…
it’s never impossible. it can be done. so all this can b attributed to laziness and politics.