(Seychelles News Agency) - Telecommunication services in Seychelles will be disrupted on Saturday due to urgent civil work to be undertaken by the city of Dar Es Salaam where the Seychelles East Africa System (SEAS) passes through, said a top official.

The chair of the Seychelles Cable System, Benjamin Choppy, said that “this work will affect the cable segment and as a result, the concerned SEAS land cable segment has to be diverted to a new duct route.”

The diversion will mean Seychelles experiences an outage for a significant part of the day. The quality of telecommunication services in the 115-island archipelago in the western Indian Ocean will negatively impact around 90 percent of internet traffic passing through the Seychelles East Africa System.

The work to divert the cable and outage will start in the early hours of Saturday morning and is expected to be completed in the late afternoon.

Choppy said that the telecommunication operators that have services on SEAS and these include Intelvision, Cable & Wireless and Airtel have been notified of this planned outage.

The marketing communications and public relations manager of Cable & Wireless, Arthur Lo Pinto, said that broadband and mobile internet and some TV channels will experience severe disruptions or total outage.

Lo Pinto said that due to international technical work by their upstream provider in Tanzania the problem is out of their control.

He added that: “We have already taken an initiative to inform our clients through SMS messages.”

The installation of the submarine fibre optic cable under the Seychelles East Africa System project took place in 2012, linking the island nation to a landing station in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Cable & Wireless Seychelles and Airtel Seychelles along with the Seychelles government are the three shareholders that have contributed towards the financing of the Seychelles Fibre Optic Cable system.