#TEAMSCableCut: Most Operators Have Invested on Single Cable System

For the umpteenth time in the last few months, Kenyans are witnessing degraded data services after the East African Marine Cable System (TEAMS) suffered what appears to be a major cable cut 5.3 Km off the coast of Mombasa. It is sad that Kenyans have to even feel the cut when the country is served by 4 cables now.

All the major data operators have reported degraded services prompting most subscribers to ask why the same operators always claim that data charges are as high as they are because “the operators are forced to invest in at least 3 fibre optic cables for assured redundancy. It seems that this is one of the lies the network operators have been feeding the consumers. Looks like all major operators including even Orange Kenya are on TEAMS and whenever the cable goes down, data access is at snail’s pace.

What a bunch of liars these operators are?

TEAMs interruption began at around 1:30 pm this afternoon. The fault was noticed by users in Mombasa before even the TEAMs network crew reported the fault. TEAMs has sent out statement indicated that its engineers noticed the interruption from the its landing station in Mombasa before immediately commencing the traffic rerouting and fault tracing exercise.

TEAMS’ General Manager Joel Tanui said

“We wish to notify all our stakeholders of this unexpected outage, we are currently working with Alcatel Submarine Networks and Etisalat to trace the cause of the service interruption. We do not wish to speculate at this time what the cause of the problem could be, however we will continue to keep the public fully informed of our findings as and when new information becomes available to us.”

This service interruption comes barely one month after deep sea repairs were successfully completed on a section of the TEAMS cable system that had been damaged by shipping activity in the channel leading to the Kilindini Harbour.

TEAMS undersea cable system serve the entire East African region. Besides the Government of Kenya, the other shareholders in the TEAMS consortium include Safaricom, Jamii Telecom, Wananchi, Essar, Kenya Data Networks, Access Kenya, Telkom Orange and Bandwidth & Cloud Services.