TEAMS upgrades fibre-optic subsea cable
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TEAMS upgrades fibre-optic subsea cable

The TEAMS consortium fibre-optic system will experience disruptions until 28 July.

The East African Marine System (TEAMS) consortium has announced that its fibre-optic system will experience continual disruptions until 28 July 2016. This is due to offshore maintenance work at the Port of Fujairah (UAE).

The work is understood to be preventive maintenance and additional security enhancements against anchoring ships and what it called ‘external aggression’ following the proposed expansion of the port.

The actual downtime will last until 28th July 2016. The works carried out after 28th July 2016 will not affect the quality of the service. TEAM said in a statement that: “This is to assure our esteemed customers that every effort will be made to minimize system downtime and service interruption.

Commenting on the planned preventive maintenance works, TEAMS General Manager Joel Tanui said, “This planned cable reinforcement works is designed to increase the security of the TEAMS cable against anchoring ships and external aggression.

The timing of the preventive work has been chosen in compliance with the UAE Port of Fujairah timelines to avail more anchoring space required for expansion of the Port. During the time of complete system downtime, estimated at a maximum of 10 days, customers are likely to experience slow internet speeds because of bandwidth constraints as traffic is routed via other cable systems. The remaining work will be carried out after the system is re-stored.

"All the preventive maintenance works are estimated to take about 2 weeks, subject to favourable sea weather conditions, with every effort being made to reduce the overall time as much as possible," said a release from TEAMS.

It is estimated that the works on TEAMS cable, including costs for temporary traffic restoration via other cables during the TEAMS cable outage, will cost approximately $3.0m.

TEAMS is a public-private partnership serving the East African region. The shareholders include the Government of Kenya, Safaricom, Telkom Kenya, Liquid Telecom Kenya, Jamii Telecom, Wananchi Telecom, Access Kenya Group and the Bandwidth & Cloud Services Group.

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