The Lesedi Waldorf Centre celebrated their 21^st birthday last month. SEACOM’s Kwanele Mpanza, Martin Sanne and Graeme Wilson, visited the centre during their celebration.

Emily Moabelo, a former domestic worker, started the centre 21 years ago for the children in the area. Now the Lesedi Waldorf Centre is an inspiring 190 student, combination of day students and week boarders; private kinder garden and primary school, grade R to grade 7.

One of SEACOM’s key Corporate Social Responsibility commitments is to provide accessible and affordable international bandwidth to East African higher education institutions, and since launching on 23 July 2009, we have delivered on this by supplying various East African National Research and Education Networks (NRENs) with discounted international bandwidth connectivity.

SEACOM recently took part in a two-day East Africa ICT (Information and communication technologies) & Higher Education Symposium, which addressed some of the key opportunities and challenges that increased access to broadband will bring to the continent.

The Symposium, which took place in Kampala, Uganda, considered three key issues:

·      Regional interconnection

The SEACOM cable was successfully repaired on 23 July 2010 and all customers have been reinstated to pre-outage configurations. SEACOM would like to take this opportunity to thank all its customers, partners and peers for their collaboration and support during the outage.  

SEACOM is pleased to confirm that all repairs to the submarine cable have been successfully completed. 

With the entire network now fully operational, our technical teams will continue to work closely with customers to reinstate their SEACOM traffic to pre-outage configurations whilst an extensive investigation will take place to determine the exact cause of the outage.

SEACOM is pleased to confirm that the physical repairs to the fault on the submarine cable are in the final stages of completion with the entire system currently undergoing testing before the cable is lowered back into the water. Our technical teams are actively working with all customers to reinstate their SEACOM traffic to pre-outage configurations and all connectivity going out of Africa is expected to be fully restored on 23 July 2010.

During the course of the past week, SEACOM has continued to work closely with its partners to roll-out the repair work programme and restoration alternatives necessary to maintain adequate connectivity during this process. 

OPERATIONAL UPDATE – 9 JULY 2010

SEACOM has continued to work closely with its partners to deploy the best plan possible for the repair operations. As communicated earlier, the exogenous factors such as location, water depth, weather and spare parts needed make this cable outage very difficult to repair and a highly specialised vessel and technical crew is being used to carry out this work.

Based on this, the current timeline indicates that the repairs may now only be finalised by 22 July 2010.

At 09:19 GMT, 5 July 2010, SEACOM experienced a submarine failure resulting in service downtime between Mumbai and Mombasa. Current investigations indicate that a repeater has failed on segment 9 of the SEACOM cable, which is offshore to the north of Mombasa. This unexpected failure affects traffic towards both India and Europe. Traffic within Africa is not affected (i.e. - traffic to African websites, such as .co.za).

Ten students from Tshwaragano Primary School in Tokoza Park, Rockville, Soweto; were treated to a once in a life time opportunity by SEACOM to see a live 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa™ game. The students, all from Grade 6 and 7, and top of their class in Mathematics and Science, were taken to see Ghana vs Serbia in a match that set Loftus Versveld on fire.