London April 28 Gateway Communications, the leading supplier of African telecommunications services, today announced that it is the only carrier on SEACOM currently operational in many East and Southern African countries following an outage on the sub-sea cable.
The cable, that runs from Europe, along the East Coast of Africa to South Africa, was launched last year and hailed as the provider of high-speed African connectivity. However, last week it announced that it was experiencing an interruption in its network on the Mediterranean section of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system, which SEACOM currently utilises to connect to London.
Scheduled repair work over the weekend meant that all Internet Service Providers on the SEACOM cable would experience disconnections, as well as the many mobile phone operators who use the cable for their IP capacity. Although repairs were expected to be concluded quickly, as of Tuesday many customers in Eastern and Southern Africa are still experiencing problems.
Gateway Communications has a fully redundant MPLS network on SEACOM and is the only company able to offer MPLS services at any point or end-to-end on the cable. By Friday last week Gateway had already re-routed all IP transits and connections through the SAT-3 cable which travels from South Africa along the Western side of Africa up to Europe. As a result, Gateway customers have experienced no disruption and Gateway is one of the few carriers operational in South Africa and the only carrier that uses SEACOM operational in Kenya, Mozambique and Tanzania.
Commenting on the situation, Silvio do Carmo, Gateway Communications’ Business Development Director, Wholesale said, “When such an outage occurs, the cost to businesses and inconvenience to customers is great and as such, we decided to re-route our connections at our own cost. Although many other operators decided to claim ‘unavoidable outage’, connecting Africa is what we do, even when the chips are down.”
About Gateway Communications
Gateway Communications is the leading pan-African wholesale connectivity and telecommunications provider, working in partnership with Africa’s mobile operators, and helping many of the world’s largest corporations stay connected across Africa and into the rest of the world.
Gateway’s core infrastructure connects over 580 million people, across more than 40 African countries and includes over 50 satellite transponders over Africa, 24 dedicated teleports throughout Africa, and access to multiple sub-sea cable landing ports around the African continent.
Gateway Communications is recognised for setting the standards for tomorrow’s communications. Gateway Communications is wholly owned by Vodacom Group Limited, which is listed on the JSE Limited under the symbol VOD.
Gateway has recently been awarded
Best pan-African Wholesale Offering, Capacity Awards November 2009
Wireless Network Infrastructure Innovation, Global Telecoms Business Innovation Awards June2009
GSM Backhaul Operator of the Year , SatCom Stars Awards April 2010
First Class Customer Service SatCom Stars Awards April 2010
ENQUIRIES
Gateway Communications
Tom Tudor, Tom.Tudor@gatewaycomms.com
Tel: + 44 20 7173 1700
africapractice
Ali Merifield, amerifield@africapractice.com
Tel: + 27 11 782 668
Jo Crawshaw, jcrawshaw@africapractice.com
Tel: + 44 207 209 7507
