When four major submarine fibre cables went offline off the West coast of Africa in March 2024, we were all reminded how dependent we had become on relatively fragile Internet infrastructure.
A suspected submarine landslide near Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire knocked out the West Africa Cable System (WACS), the Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT3 cables.
Compounding the problem was a triple cable break in the Red Sea off Africa’s East coast impacting Seacom, EIG, and AAE–1.
While South Africa was severely affected, with Vodacom’s network going down and Microsoft’s entire Azure data centre offline for hours, several of our neighbours had it worse.
Countries like Nigeria, Ghana, and Cote d’Ivoire were knocked almost entirely offline. The Gambia, Guinea, and Liberia are only connected by a single submarine cable — ACE.
Infrastructure and network service providers like the West Indian Ocean Cable Company (Wiocc) leapt into action immediately.
Fortunately, Google’s Equiano cable had gone live along the West coast of Africa in August 2022.
Capacity was also available on the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) along the East coast of the continent. (EASSy and Seacom would later experience a break in May.)
However, while capacity on Equiano had been available for nearly nineteen months, not all operators had elected to activate or “light” some.
Lighting capacity is costly and typically involves committing to a long-term contract.
It also requires installing and commissioning specialised hardware where a cable lands.
To light Equiano capacity, companies who had bought access to one of the twelve fibre pairs on the cable had to get the hardware and a technician to the site.
For example, Wiocc field engineer Bongani Mabaso flew with line cards from South Africa to Nigeria via Rwanda at 03:00 one morning, shortly after the breaks.
Once he had installed the physical hardware, other technicians and engineers could perform the network configuration to give customers access to the submarine cable.
Wiocc CEO Chris Wood emphasised that restoring the Internet in West Africa was a huge team effort involving over 90 individuals.
“This photo is just one example of numerous sacrifices made by the team,” Wood stated.
The dedicated techies, project coordinators, and support staff who work on the continent’s submarine cable capacity are only one part of South Africa’s Internet puzzle.
There are similarly dedicated people building and maintaining South Africa’s cellular networks and fibre infrastructure.
These include those at Vodacom, MTN, Telkom, Cell C, Rain, Vumatel, Openserve, Herotel, Metrofibre, Frogfoot, Octotel, and a myriad of smaller yet still essential companies.
Another critical component is the various data centre providers in South Africa, including Teraco, Africa Data Centres, Open Access Data Centres, NTT Data, Hetzner, and others.
Without the techies who keep these facilities running, there would be no Internet connectivity, let alone content, as data centres house Internet exchange points.
In addition to the engineers and technicians who build the physical infrastructure, South Africa also has highly skilled networking professionals who keep our exchange points running.
Then there are the network and system administrators who manage things like Border Gateway Protocol configurations, peering arrangements, and the various technical aspects needed to run an Internet service provider.
On top of this, an army of software developers build and maintain systems for customers to buy products and services, and monitor and manage their networks.
Huge TNS managing director Marius Oberholzer proposed last year that Time Magazine should recognise “the IT engineer” as its Person of the Year.
“Indeed, just as Time occasionally confers Person of the Year status on inanimate objects like the personal computer (1982) or on a collective (The Protestor, 2011), South Africa missed an opportunity by not awarding National Order status to ‘the IT engineer’ as a group,” Oberholzer said.
Oberholzer said that the regular challenges of maintaining networks were made even more difficult in South Africa thanks to the energy crisis.
While South Africa is closing in on 100 days without load-shedding, 2023 was Eskom’s worst year ever.
“Many of us in increasingly noticed friends and relatives in the ICT sector excusing themselves from social events to attend to yet another after hours, Eskom-created communications emergency,” Oberholzer said.
“With Eskom on the blink since 2007, there can’t be a group of ICT professionals anywhere in the world that have performed so admirably under such ridiculous conditions,” he added.
“I was going to write ‘challenging,’ but a decade-and-a-half of load-shedding is, in fact, ridiculous.”
Oberholzer extended his thanks to the men and women in the trenches, and encouraged all South Africans to do the same.
The seamlessness of Internet connectivity can create the false impression that keeping these systems running is easy.
However, the reality is that the global Internet is kept running thanks to the dedication, skill, self-sacrifice, and downright stubbornness of the noble techie — individuals around the world who have made it their mission to do so.
Obligatory XKCD
Source
mybroadband.co.za
