by Macharia Kamau

Internet users had to settle for the slower satellite connection after one of the terrestrial fibre optic cable networks was cut yesterday.

The Kenya Data Networks (KDN) network, between Mombasa and Voi, was cut at about 10.40am, leaving many corporates and retail Internet users without connectivity.

The incident comes barely a week after subscribers of the country’s largest mobile phone service provider, Safaricom, were unable to communicate following several cuts on KDN’s network in Nairobi.

KDN ruled out the cut on the Nairobi-Mombasa link as an act of industrial sabotage saying, "It was most probably a usual vandal digging up copper cables".

The KDN link carries traffic for the two undersea fibre optic cables, the East African Marine cable System (Teams) and Seacom, to Nairobi, the rest of the country and parts of East Africa.

KDN said they had rerouted all traffic to TEAMS undersea cable and satellite connectivity shortly after the disruption occurred.

KDN’s network supports huge traffic between Nairobi and Mombasa, including some mobile phone operators and a number of banks that have branches in both cities.

The company did not give the cost implications of the downtime caused by the fibre cut, and the resultant effect of rerouting customers to satellite connectivity, which is both costly and slow.

In the past, the firms said it spends about Sh10 million to repair fiber cable cuts every month, and loses a further Sh30 million monthly in additional bandwidth given to customers to compensate for downtimes caused by fibre cuts.