noticeboard.ru.ac.za

At around midnight last night we lost all access to the Internet as a result of a fault somewhere on Telkom's network.

The fault was reported to Telkom at 7:20 this morning; we're still waiting for them to diagnose to problem and give us an estimated time-to-resolution. As is normal with these sorts of outages, I suspect that this will take some time. We'll continue to post updates here as we get them.

Access to sites connected to the Grahamstown Internet Exchange (Albany schools, Imaginet, Grahamstown Foundation, etc) is not affected.

And it has just happened again ... Having had Internet access back all morning, it appears to have been broken again about ten minutes ago. We'll phone Telkom to report it just as soon as we've finished our own diagnosis.

The fault in question appears to be affecting Rhodes, Fort Hare, and parts of Walter Sisulu universities. Telkom tell me that the problem is as a result of "transmission failure" (which is kind of stating the obvious, but still) and they "don't know" how long it'll take to fix.

Given the localities, my guess is that there's a problem on Telkom's ATM network somewhere around East London or Bhisho.

Telkom have just called me back to say that the problem is that there's a break in the fibre optic cable between East London and Bhisho (cable theft?). They've located the break and they've got technicians splicing the fibres. Having no idea of how many fibres there are to splice or what order they chose to splice them in, it is difficult to predict how long it'll be before we get connectivity back.

According to Telkom's call centre, they're still busy splicing fibre optics between Bhisho and East London. Whether this translates to people on the scene doing work in reality ...