If you’ve been trying to do your job, or just live your life, and connecting to overseas websites has become an experience akin to watching paint dry, you aren’t alone.

All across the country, internet users are experiencing slow internet speeds.

The problem has been traced back to a suspected West Africa Cable System (WACS) fault between Limbe (Cameroon) and DRC (Muanda).

The South Atlantic 3/West Africa (SAT-3/Wasc) submarine cable is also experiencing problems.

If your once lightning fast internet connection is now lagging, this could be the reason.

If you have no idea what a WACS (below) or SAT-3 cable is or what it does, you aren’t alone. Thankfully, MyBroadband explains:

WACS is a submarine cable which links South Africa with the United Kingdom. It has 14 landing points – 12 along the western coast of Africa and two in Europe.

The SAT3 cable links South Africa to Portugal and Spain, and also includes landing points at several West African countries.

Here’s how it affects you:

The WACS cable downtime affects most large ISPs in South Africa, including Webafrica, Afrihost, Axxess, and Mind The Speed.

Many of these ISPs posted network status updates citing the international cable outage as the cause of slow international connections.

Certain ISPs are now routing their traffic via the EASSY cable which is negatively impacting latency.

Openserve is working with the undersea cable consortiums to solve the problem.

Right now, nobody can say when the internet will be back to its old self, so you’re just going to have to hang in there a little longer.

[source:mybroadband]