FLAG and SMW4 Repair to take at least a week

As (bad)luck would have it, FLAG, a submarine cable, is down because of a Fiber Optic Cable cut 8.3km off Alexandria in Egypt.

To add to the misery, the SMW4 submarine cable system is also down because of a Fiber Optic cable cut between Palermo and Marseille. How these two systems went down hours apart is another mystery. Perhaps you can share your thoughts on that. Conspiracy?? or just another of Mother Nature's coincidences?

FLAG and SMW4 Repair will now be performed by separate ships. Originally, it was planned that FLAG and SMW4 repair would be undertaken by the same entity.

PTCL's additional capacity on SMW3 has NOT been arranged yet. I was expecting it to be operational by yesterday evening. I'll update once that has been done.

Update TWA1 has now (finally) an STM-1 from Singtel on SMW3. However, this is unlikely to improve upon the quality of Internet available on TWA1 since the sold bandwidth is above 2Gbps.

Update After failing to procure STM-4 and multiple STM-1 from Telecom Italia, PTCL is now arranging the same from Singtel. Browsing and Emails etc are working fine on PTCL. However, overall, the service is degraded. If this STM4 and three STM-1s become operational, this would add almost 1 Gbps to the available bandwidth for a total of 4.6Gbps. Internet for PTCL customers would then become 'normal'. :-)

Call Centers in Pakistan are suffering the most since PTCL has an unofficial policy of not opening voice ports (SIP ports, for example) even for Legitimate call centers. PTCL forces customers to get bandwidth directly from them if they want to open the Voice Ports. Still working on that.

The latest Update from FLAG which I just received is as follows:

From: Service Desk FLAG Telecom [mailto:servicedesk@flagtelecom.com]
Sent: Friday, February 01, 2008 12:12 AM
Cc: Service Desk FLAG Telecom
Subject: CASE116815 | Subsea cable cut on FEA SS-2 | Update - 6

Ladies / Gentleman

FLAG will be using Cableship CS Certamen to undertake this repair now. The repair will now be separate to that of SMW-4. It is still expected that the ship will arrive at the Alexandria repair ground on Tuesday 5th Feb. Preparations are currently underway to load the cable required on to the ship at Catania, Italy.

The FLAG GNOC is completing the remaining Pre-Planned Restoration. It is now expected that this will not be completed until tomorrow (1st February) due to cross connects having to be manually configured in the DACS equipment.

Requests for Ad-Hoc Restoration should be made via your FLAG Telecom Account Manager.