The number 1 ISP in Suriname, Telesur, got a major blow this weekend when there were problems in the Americas II fiber optics line that feeds French Guiana, Suriname and Guyana.

This has happened a couple of times before in the last 18 months, but this time it seems as if the problem may take a little longer to fix than the other times. The expected deadline of 3-4 days is now extended to at least 2 weeks.

It seems like a repeater somewhere on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of French Guiana is causing trouble. This repeater is located about 20 kilometers from the coast. The specialists who have to take care of the problem are shipped by boat, a journey that can take up to 8 days. After their arrival they still have to find the faulty repeater and probably replace it. This process can take a couple of days since normal divers can’t just “swim” to the bottom of the ocean at this location.

Telesur is now quickly setting up some more satellite connections to serve it’s customers in the meantime. But at the moment, the Internet service is very limited.

Everything that could suck up bandwidth unnecessarily is blocked. Normal browsing via the http protocol is allowed, along with POP and SMTP services for sending and receiving email. https, for secure http transmissions, is allowed, but it seems as if this protocol is so extensively used that there is virtually no movement.

So in the coming days, I’ll be less active during the day on my blog than usual, because traffic is very slow around those times. At night there are less people online, so I’ll try to do all my blogging related activities by that time.

In the mean time, you can check out my Get Rehuel to FOOA campaign.