Perth-Singapore undersea cable repaired

Repairs to the Perth to Singapore leg of an undersea cable that was cut in January this year have finally been completed, with connectivity restored yesterday at 11am WST, according to Australian ISPs using the link.

Taking almost four months to complete, the restoration of the 480 gigabit per second SEA-ME-WE 3 cable were hampered by Indonesian government red tape that stopped the repair ship from operating in that country's waters.

The cable breakage was impacting latency for Microsoft Office 365 customers in Australia and New Zealand, whose traffic to Microsoft's Singapore data centre is routed across the link.

One Office 365 administrator who wanted to remain anonymous confirmed that the cable came back up yesterday.

"Our latency to Singapore dropped by 120 milliseconds," the administrator said.

SEA-ME-WE 3 cable landing station in Perth.

The restoration conincided with a three-hour service outage affecting parts of the Office365 service in New Zealand.

Microsoft confirmed the problems, but declined to provide an explanation as to what caused them.