LEON THEVENIN

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Cable layer en route to repair cable faults

The 'Léon Thévenin' departed Cape Town Harbour on May 14, 2024, at 3.45 p.m. UTC for the site of the faults on the Eastern Africa Submarine System (EASSy) and Seacom cables, which occurred on May 12. The faults were reported on the EASSy and Seacom cables off the East Coast of Africa, knocking out all subsea capacity between East Africa and South Africa. The cable faults were impacting Internet connectivity to Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Tanzania. Traffic drops of between 30% and 75% in impacted countries were observed. Following these cable faults, South African users complained about poor Netflix performance and issues connecting to other online services. However, the East coast submarine cables may have only been part of the problem. Several terrestrial cable failures also occurred, reducing capacity between Johannesburg and Cape Town. The vessel was expected to arrive at the cable grounds on May 18 at around 05:00 a.m. The 'Léon Thévenin' is equipped with various cable work tools such as grapnels, buoys, ropes, and dead weights and a ROV that can be used to detect, cut, recover, join, and test undersea fibre cables. The vessel had docked in Cape Town Harbour on April 25 after returning from Abidjan, where it had attended to a fault on the SAT-3 cable.

Two cable layers to repair cable breaks after suspected landslide

The 'Léon Thévenin' has arrived at the site of one of four major undersea fibre cable breaks. A second ship, Global Marine’s 'C.S. Sovereign', was en route too after after a suspected submarine landslide that knocked out four undersea cables on March 14, 2024, causing severe Internet disruptions in South Africa and all along Africa’s Western coast near Abidjan, breaking the West Africa Cable System (WACS), Africa Coast to Europe (ACE), MainOne, and SAT-3. Due to the location and depth of the breaks, the cable owners have ruled out sabotage, stray boat anchors, and other human activity as possible causes for the outages. This left a submarine landslide as the most likely explanation. The cable breaks caused a roughly two-hour outage on Vodacom’s data network in South Africa. It also took down Microsoft’s locally hosted cloud services, preventing people from accessing their email, Teams meetings, and other Microsoft 365 services. The Microsoft Azure region in South Africa was also offline for several hours, leaving companies like payments provider Yoco unable to function. Services were restored after the impacted companies secured additional capacity on undersea cables that were still operational, like Google’s Equiano. Vodacom and Microsoft have not yet explained why a lack of international bandwidth also disrupted their local connectivity. Network infrastructure company WIOCC, an investor in WACS, has provided an update on the repairs to the four broken submarine cables. The 'Léon Thévenin'Ä set sail on March 19 from Cape Town. However, it will only attend to the SAT-3 break and reached the fault area on March 29. WACS is the more important cable for most South African network service providers, as the Telkom-controlled SAT-3 offers much less capacity. Regardless, it was expected that repairs to SAT-3 will be completed by the second week of April, barring any unforeseen circumstances. The 'C.S. Sovereign' will work on MainOne, WACS, and ACE with an ETA as of April 8. She had sailed from London on March 21, stopped in Brest on March 22 and sailed again on March 24. It paused again at Santa Cruz de Tenerife on March 3ß before leaving on April 1. Barring any unforeseen circumstances, the expected restoration dates for the remaining cables are as follows: - ACE by April 17; WACS by April 28 and MainOne by May 9- While a submarine landslide was the suspected cause of the breaks, WIOCC said that no formal diagnosis of the cause has been possible.

Orange Marine cable ship Leon Thevenin helps keep Africa online

One of Orange’s fleet of cable ships, the Leon Thevenin, makes Cape Town Harbour its home port and is always ready to ensure business continuity for Orange Business Services’ customers, whether to embark on repair voyages or on missions to deploy cabling required to keep the African continent connected to the world. South Africa-based enterprise customers of Orange Business Services had the opportunity to tour the ship last week to discover how Orange contributes to the development of the broadband infrastructure in Africa. The tour, hosted by the Commandant of the ship Gerald Couturier and Vice President of the Middle East and Africa (MEA) Region for Orange Business Services Jean-Luc Lasnier, included a close look at how Orange Marine installs and maintains more than 170 000km of submarine cables in the world’s oceans, including 140 000km of optic fiber. http://www.biztechafrica.com/article/how-orange-marine-cable-ship-leon-thevenin-helps-k/7154/?section=internet#.UnJMAPk9948