...difficult, hostile and remote environments but on this particular occasion, the environment was more challenging than usual. Hermes Datacomms has provided its client, a major E&P company, with a leased line service to Luanda, Angola, since November 2011. Recently, the service experienced some prolonged outages due to civil engineering works resulting in frequent fibre optic cable cuts. Hermes has full responsibility for the end to end Service Level Agreement. Although the cuts were outside of Hermes’ direct responsibility, the company is fully committed to the SLA.

Hermes Datacomms dispatched Barry Bouwmeester, Africa Business Development Manager, and Johan Lepen, Service Account Manager, to Angola to negotiate a resilient path option with a local service provider and Angola Telecom. Commenting on the situation, Account Director Bill Green said, “We, at Hermes, were disappointed professionally that the service was suffering, even though the causes were outside our control. Nevertheless, we take our SLA commitment to our clients very seriously and the implementation of the diverse routing although costing us in financial terms has been paid back in customer confidence, which we consider a far more valuable commodity”.

Hermes Datacomms provides satellite and fibre links to some of the most remote and challenging locations, both onshore and offshore. Solutions are tailored specifically to the oil and gas industry and include international connections, managed networks and oilfield infrastructure.