noticeboard.ru.ac.za

2011/02/06-10 Seacom Maintenance Work
TENET have received notice from SEACOM that there will be an outage of the SEACOM fibre between 6 February and 10 February 2011. This is due to maintenance work on the SEA-ME-WE-4 fibre system.

TENET has secured sufficient alternative bandwidth during this period to meet the current and anticipated demand. As a result it is unlikely that there will be a prolonged Internet outage (although there might be a few short ones to handle switching traffic off and onto the SEACOM fibre). However, the bandwidth they've secured terminates in the Far East. This means that traffic to/from Europe and the Americas will have to travel significantly further than normal (all the way around the world in fact). As a result of this, we can expect that latency will increase significantly.

You will likely experience this as the international Internet being "slower" than normal. In addition, some latency-sensitive applications (like voice over IP traffic or realtime video) will suffer, perhaps to the point of being unusable.

If an when more information is available, we'll post it here.
SEACOM have informed TENET that this work has been postponed until at least April
post.5532542