Uganda to suffer slow internet connectivity

Uganda and other East African countries will experience slow Internet connections due to damage to several undersea fibre-optic cables.

Sources from Airtel Uganda said about 80 million Internet users in East Africa experienced either slow or intermittent service due to the outage.

Mr David Birungi, an industry player, who spoke to Monitor last evening, said: “Ugandans should not worry now or restart routers or call centres. It’s being worked on, and the capacity has increased, and the speed has started to improve. We believe that within the next hour, we shall have stability. We have already informed the UCC as well.”

Mr Birungi said: “We get the Internet from an upstream provider, and like all services, sometimes they are interrupted. Today, at around 6.30am, we received information that there was a problem because we had reported slow speeds.”

Several regional and international media yesterday reported the outage, with Bloomberg saying at least one sub-sea cable serving the region seems cut 45 kilometers north of Durban, South Africa.

The media company said several nations in East Africa are experiencing slow Internet connections.
 Eastern Africa, the African Development Bank says, is served by the East African Submarine Cable System (EASSY); a 10,000km submarine fibre-optic cable system deployed along the east and south coast of Africa to serve the voice, data, video, and Internet needs of the region, connecting Africa to the rest of the world.

According to BBC News, Cloudflare Radar, which monitors Internet connectivity, Tanzania was the worst affected country with traffic falling to 30 percent of the expected levels.

In Kenya, Safaricom has also been experiencing the same challenge. Malawi, Mozambique, and Madagascar have been affected according to Cloudflare radar.

Mr Ben Roberts, from Pan African Company Liquid Intelligent Technologies, said he had confirmed that one cable that runs alongside the coast of East Africa, known as EASSY had been cut earlier on Sunday; some 45km (28 miles) north of the South African port city of Durban.

Early March this year, widespread outrage was reported in countries, including South Africa, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Benin, Ghana, and Burkina Faso.

REGIONAL IMPACT
Nape Nnauye, Tanzania’s minister of information, communication and information technology, said in a statement the government had been informed by EASSY and SEACOM of disruption to the Internet caused by a fault on the cables between Mozambique and South Africa.

"As they continue to solve the problem, we will have very low access to internet and international voice calls."