Another undersea Internet cable damaged in Mideast: Indian firm (4th?)

Yahoo News ^ | 03 February 2008

[metmom]

Cables being cut is a random event?

[John Valentine]

When I cleaned out hundreds and hundreds of old magazines due to a move in 2002, that issue of WIRED was the ONLY magazine I saved.

[Arkinsaw]

Yeah, but severed cables undersea are not simple coin flips.

[Eroteme]

In a coin toss, there are only two possible outcomes. And coins are deliberately placed in the hands of the coin tossers for the express purpose of tossing them. The experiment would be greatly affected if the coins were glued to the floor and any would-be coin tossers specifically kept miles away.

The cables are in no-go areas, and Egypt reviewed video of at least one of them. No ships in the 12 hours either before or after.

[CPOSharky]

I understand that now, it just surprised me that in an era of cell phones, wi-fi and everything else, that we would still have tens of thousands of miles of wires cirss-crossing our oceans.

As soon as a cell or wi-fi signals hit a tower they are converted to wire or fiber transmission.

[Admin Moderator]

The publisher of Wired.com has asked that Free Republic allow no Wired.com material to be posted here.

Updated FR Excerpt and Link Only or Deny Posting List due to Copyright Complaints

[Straight Vermonter]

3rd FLAG Undersea Cable Cut, Now Between UAE and Oman

Two days after cable cuts which "cut off Iran" and affected the rest of the Middle East and West Asia but left communications in Israel and Iraq "intact", another cable owned by the same British company is severed, once again plunging the region into "Internet darkness". Image: FLAG's Europe-Asia "FEA" undersea cable network

Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai's Internet Service Provider "DU", said on Friday that an undersea cable had been cut in the Persian Gulf, causing severe phone line disruptions and making worse the already existing Internet outage across large parts of the Middle East and West Asia after two other undersea cables owned by the same British company were cut this week in the Mediterranean Sea 8.3 kilometers (5 miles) north of Alexandria, Egypt.

Mr Sultan said that the incident was "very unusual." He said it was not known how the underwater cable, owned by British FLAG FALCON company, which runs between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, had been damaged. DU said in a press release that the cause of the incident "had not yet been identified."

The owner of the FALCON cable, U.K. FLAG Telecom said the cable was cut at 05:59 UTC on Friday, 56 kilometers (35 miles) off the coast of Dubai and that a "repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days." The British company is also the owner of one of the undersea cables linking Egypt (Alexandria) with Italy (Palermo) that were sliced Wednesday in the Mediterranean Sea. That damage triggered wide Internet outages, hampering businesses and private usage across the Middle East and West Asia, and cutting off Iran "completely", according to reports.

The only 2 countries that were unaffected were Israel and Iraq, the only two close Anglo-American allies in the region, both remaining completely unaffected by the cable cuts, leading to theories for the causes of the cuts, which have so far been given as having been caused by ships dragging their anchors across the cables. The fact that two rare incidents have happened in the same week, and both with cables owned by the same company, on either sides of Israel and the importance of the Internet to telecommunications and business, lends suspicion to the events.

Agency reports state that a FLAG official in India, speaking on condition of anonymity because of company policy, said workers were still trying to determine how the Persian Gulf cable was cut. Earlier Friday, FLAG said that a repair ship was expected to arrive Tuesday at the site of the damaged cables off the coast of Alexandria, and that repair work would likely take a week, but gave no explanation why repairs would take so long.

FLAG Europe Asia (FEA) is the world's longest privately funded submarine cable. FLAG Telecom owns undersea communication cables across the United States of America, to England, West Europe and the Middle East, onward to South Asia and the Far East, and again across to the United States thus spanning the northern world.

Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil on Friday said the reason behind Wednesday's cut undersea cable would only be determined once repair teams with their robot equipment reach the damaged cables.

[metmom]

Seems to me that I heard they were underwater cables.

Wouldn’t subs or submersible devices be more of a threat?

[DvdMom]

bump

[CPOSharky]

Wouldn’t subs or submersible devices be more of a threat?

Anchors are submersible. ;-)

[cajungirl]

Don’t the CHinese have those teeny little subs?

I have no knowledge of all of this but enought to know this is significant.

Either pest like sabotage or something is about to happen.

Why isn’t this a bigger story in the press?

[metmom]

Conspiracy theorists want to know.

I wonder if it’s being deliberately kept under wraps. Considering the area of the world it’s primarily affecting....

[cajungirl]

It isn’t under wraps and I don’t see a conspiracy. I am curious as to why the press doesn’t see what is obvious and a little alarming.

The press is missing this for some odd reason.

[ModelBreaker]

Most people do not understand that random events can occur in batches.

Hmmmm. Your example has a 0.5 probability of heads/tails. I'm thinking cable breaks don't.

[MarineBrat]

If “David” answers just hang up!

I generally do, and actually have on more than one occasion. :) I had a situation where I was able to prove that a Verizon internal router was having a problem, and could show through traceroute logs that it was choking on certain traffic, but Habib had trouble when my questions weren't on the script.

Long story short, after about five Habib's I had to agree to pay $65 to speak to a Canadian, and after about an hour of teaching him how the internet worked he said, "hey, you're right. Our 20.35.1.1 router is messed up." They didn't charge me the $65. :)

During that process I didn't even bother to speak to Habib... er, uh, I mean "Frank" or "David" a couple of times. I just said "no thank you" as soon as I heard them start on the script and "lock up" when my response wasn't on their logic flow.

[Centurion2000]

bump .. wonder who’s doing it.

[Kevmo]

They’re probably trying to tap these cables with listening devices, for intelligence gathering.

[CarrotAndStick]

I doubt it. Anything added to, or removed from, an optic cable can be detected. The cable isn’t a simple wire... it is a complex system of matched optic fibres and dedicated in-line power feed to supply energy to the repeaters that are placed at intervals.

[Kevmo]

I have actually heard otherwise. The only time it’s detectable is when it’s added, and that takes ultra high security military technology. That won’t be the case for regular Internet lines.

Most of us have experienced some temporary lag over the internet and we would never be able to chase down the source as some tapped fiber cable, we just continue on our way.

[CarrotAndStick]

No, but attenuation of the light as it passes between repeaters is constantly monitored. Besides, these devices are very sensitive to changes in medium as the light traverses the fibre.

A device added to a section of the cable will first have to be independently powered, which is very difficult for something that is placed miles below sea-level. Any device drawing power from the supply lines within the cable will be detected.

If someone wants to add a device, the cable will have to be brought to the surface, or the operation performed with suitable insulation from the salt water of the ocean, which will otherwise short-circuit the DC supply lines, from an exposed section. This, is too difficult to perform without detection, especially in constantly monitored military zones like where it happened this time, in Alexandria.

Finally, the most secure methods of transferring military intelligence are not through dedicated lines. It is by merging bits of information with the bulk of the chaos of the internet, through pre-determined websites and the like. The final decoding will require massive super-computing capabilities to decipher, by a third party.

A very crude system of the above is employed by Islamic terrorists, and more than once, they have been able to send messages across without leakage. This, at the amateur level.