Basslink back in action after six-month outage

The Basslink subsea electricity and data cable connecting Tasmania to mainland Australia has begun operating again after six months of downtime.

The company said the power element of the cable resumed operation on Monday, and is exporting and importing 112 mega Watt per hour one day ahead of schedule.

The fibre-optic data link that runs alongside the power connector was originally scheduled to return to service at the same time, but Basslink said it had managed to restore the cable to full functionality last Friday.

The cable operator originally expected repairs to be completed by the middle of March this year, but finding the fault and fixing the fault turned out to be a lengthy process.

The six-month long outage for Basslink caused headaches for Tasmanian internet providers and their customers. 

To stem customer anger over service degradation, Tasmania's government had to intervene and request internet providers to organise more capacity on alternative cables connecting the island state.

Basslink said it was still working on a full fault diagnosis for the cable cut, which occured last December.