High Speed Internet Connection Slows Down by Ship Anchor in East Africa

Anchors Away!

What a difference an anchor makes

When a ship lowered its anchor off the coast of Mombasa, Kenya earlier this week, it unknowingly severed
the t1 Internet access to over a handful of East African countries, including Burundi, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and South Sudan’s capital of Juba.

The Indian Ocean East Africa Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable was cut after the ship dropped its anchor in an area that is considered restricted due to the presence of sea cabling. Created as an alternative to the South Africa-owned East African Submarine Cable System (EASSy), the TEAMS cable is owned by the Kenyan government, in conjunction with Etisalat, an Emirati company. The Wall Street Journal reported that the TEAMS cable, which connects East Africa to the United Arab Emirates, carried transmitted traffic from a previous severing of three other cables located in the Red Sea.

According to Noel Mwakugu, the BBC’s Nairobi correspondent, during the three weeks that the TEAMS cable is being repaired, the six East African countries will be forced to function at a reduced speed that will impede the usual flow by approximately 20%.

Meanwhile, Kenya’s suffered substantial losses. The country’s permanent secretary in the Ministry of Communications and Information, Bitenge Ndemo, asserted that, while they do not yet know the total cost, it will likely be in the millions given that both "TEAMS and EASSY carry almost 70 percent of the traffic from the East African Region". Ndemo added that, by his own estimations, Kenya could lose as much as $500 million by the time the repairs are finished.

While the outage itself is unfortunate, it is made even more so at a time where the recent availability of reliable, high-speed broadband connection have allowed Kenya – specifically its capital of Nairobi – to assume a leading role in both technological innovation and entrepreneurship. Laid in 2009, the underwater fiber-optic cables have sparked the country’s high-tech industry, and been the driving force behind the recent near doubled number of Internet users in Kenya

As a result of the cut, network speeds have slowed significantly, affecting the quality of some service providers. Luckily however, of the 3 East African cable connections, one was left untouched. Kenya’s ITC Board CEO, Paul Kukubo, stated “we are lucky to have this redundancy on our undersea cables.”
The outage could affect growing foreign investment.

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