SEACOM the undersea cable notorious for bringing South Africans cheap international bandwidth has broken down yet again, leaving lots of South African with limited or no international Internet connectivity at all.

Clients of ISPs making use of SEACOM started reporting connectivity issues from 23:30 last night. MWEB released a statement on Twitter that the cable break is in Cairo and related to a curfew in region engineers delayed to fix.

MWEB is currently running at 65% of its international capacity and in an attempt to provide customers with a pleasant browsing experience during the outages, has cut all P2P traffic. This means that service like bittorrent will not function during the outage.

Many ISP’s has raised concern with one SEACOM client saying that they must really get off this cable system as the “failure rate is ridiculous”.

What are your thoughts? Can you live with cable breaks as long as you have access to cheap Internet?

Internet Solutions (IS) will be repackaging it current Uncapped ADSL and Express packages from the 1st of August 2010.

IS will be launching its uncapped ADSL services to the SME and Home markets through their wholesale reseller channel. The repackaging include the implementation of a fair usage policy and the consolidation of the existing express uncapped ADSL packages under a single range running over SEACOM.

“In designing the new range of uncapped services IS has focused on sustainability and will be introducing a fair usage policy. In short, the new products will offer a great service for light and moderate users and the introduction of a new 1024kbps service will help fill the gap in both pricing and throughput,” said IS.

Suggested retail pricing for IS uncapped

With the introduction of SEACOM we have seen a large number of ISPs jumping onboard the uncapped ADSL bandwagon offering cheap uncapped options to the public, but with recent problems on the SEACOM cable its clear that cheap uncapped does not always result in the best service with redundancy.

I guess you will always get what you pay for.

The long awaited SEACOM cable will be flipping the on switch today.

After a setback about a month ago SEACOM had to postpone the launch of their 1.28Tbps undersea cable stretching from London to Cape Town by 28 days.

From today retail carriers will be able to utilise the $600-million, 15 000 km undersea fibre-optic cable system with equal and open access to affordable bandwidth

To celebrate the launch of SEACOM, Neotel and CISCO have invited stakeholders and the media to a live demonstration of the fibre optic cable.  Delegates will also be given the opportunity to test drive the SEACOM cable through provided Internet connections.

“SEACOM is turning on the switch for you to enjoy true broadband!” the companies said in a joint statement.

Seacom the new undersea cable bringing afordable bandwidth to Africa’s launch has been delayed.

Acording to the Seacom blog the reason for the delay is due to cautionary for pirates as the cable runs through pirate infested waters where there is still some work due to be done before the cable goes live.

The launch date has been pushed from 27 June 2009 to 23 July 2009, for more info visit the Seacom Blog.

Seacom the new undersea cable operator bringing more bandwidth to Africa has officialy launched their blog today. Users can visit the blog for up to date news about the Seacom cable.

The site is not only a blog but contains galleries about the contruction of the cable and the landing stations. There is also a forum available where any user can discuss anything from bandwidth usage to investment opertunities. The site also boasts a application to help get your ISP on the bandwagon for cheaper international bandwidth, you simply fill out the questions and Seacom will contact your ISP regarding access on the cable.

Users can also follow seacom via twitter @SeacomLive Check out the Seacom Blog Here