Posted on 02/03/2008 7:26:10 PM PST by NCjim
Ships are not responsible for damaging undersea internet cables in the Mediterranean, Egypt's Government says.
Two cables were damaged earlier this week in the Mediterranean sea and another off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia.
A fourth cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged on Sunday causing yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qtel said.
Egypt's transport ministry said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.
"The ministry's maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area," a statement said.
"The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships."
Earlier reports said that the damage had been caused by ships that had been diverted off their usual route because of bad weather.
A repair ship is expected to begin work to fix the two Mediterranean cables on Tuesday.
I can’t believe it has gone this long before the Arabs blamed the JOOOOOOOS.
I can’t believe it has gone this long before the Arabs blamed the JOOOOOOOS.
Wonder if there may be some commercial hijinks going on here. Maybe an alternative cable company or comm source (satellite) may be the ones cutting cables.
That's like saying, "I'm not worried about somebody throwing me over a cliff, because eventually they'll feel sorry they did it."
A Sawfish, of course.
“Mayer Amschel Bauer said,
February 1, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Third cable break today. I work with Submarine Cable Systems, and generally they are so reliable that you can go years without seeing a single break. Now three in the same area - in three days? Sabotage, beyond all doubt.”
(http://hedonisticpleasureseeker.wordpress.com/2008/02/01/i-have-a-real-bad-feeling-about-this/)
Navy SEALS making a trial run so when war erupts in the Middle East, we will shut down communications.
The Middle East is getting close to a Berlin Wall 1989 moment. I give it about two more years.
SEALS don’t do the deep stuff, it would have been deep sea divers. Two different outfits. But more likely it would have been robotic submersibles with no human involvement.
“Ships are not responsible for damaging undersea internet cables in the Mediterranean, Egypt’s Government says. “
No, of course not. The easiest, most direct explanation cannot be the reason, and definitely doesn’t fit into the paranoia that is endemically resident in the Arab mind.
“I guarantee its Israel cutting the internet cables, they have every reason to do so.”
Israel has no good reason to cut the cables now. They COULD do it, of course, but they would wait until there was a good reason to do so, like a war.
Israel is patient that way, and doesn’t use their overwhelming technical superiority over their Arab neighbors on pranks like this.
A fishing boat dragged a net across it, or it was an anchor drag. Just like many, if not most other cable breaks.
“Tell me why 4 cables have been cut in the past week all over the mideast and asia then? It’s affected mostly Muslim countries with the exception of India.”
Mariners who can’t or won’t read charts?
It’s the simple explanation and doesn’t require an elaborate conspiracy theory.
Tin foil hat on and fitting properly, sir!!
Wonder if this is some new attack from the bad guys??
(Or maybe it’s just sea monsters, bored...)
When news broke Jan. 31 that an undersea fiber-optic cable owned by India's Reliance Communications had been accidentally sliced by a ship's anchor in Egypt, people feared a possible replay of 2006. That's when an earthquake in Taiwan disrupted Internet traffic in East Asia for nearly two weeks. India, where the Internet is the lifeblood of the outsourcing industry, was considered particularly vulnerable.
Happily for Reliance (which did not respond to phone calls), and for Indian outsourcing giants Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) , Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and Satyam Computer Services, which use such undersea fiber-optic cables, no serious problems occurred. Neither, it appears, have the global operations of multinational tech players like IBM (IBM) skipped a beat. True, some of India's Internet cafes saw connection speeds slow dramatically, so the time needed to connect to Google increased 60 times—from two seconds to two minutes—but overall the economic impact of the accident has proven minimal for India.
It could have been much, much worse. According to the Internet Service Providers Assn. of India, nearly half of the 25 gigabits of bandwidth India uses relies on cables, of which 60% snake under the Atlantic Ocean. The rest is routed through the Pacific.
Instead, the disruptions gave India's outsourcers the opportunity to prove to their clients how well they're prepared for such emergencies. As soon as the problem with the Reliance cable became known, traffic was rerouted through the alternative network of cables running under the Pacific Ocean. "There are redundancies built into the system. There are multiple pipes, so if one breaks, others work," says Pradipta Bagchi, a spokesman for Tata Consultancy Services.
Bagchi explains the pecking order for Internet traffic priority. Top of the heap is voice—so that calls to Aunt Mathilda in Missouri or cousin Vijay in Bangalore are unaffected. Then come international private leased lines—networks that banks such as JPMorgan (JPM) or tech service providers such as IBM (IBM), TCS, and Infosys use to connect to clients and their other locations across the world. "These links get high priority and get switched automatically to another line," Bagchi says.
For this privilege, the larger companies pay double or triple the cost to telecom providers such as Reliance, AT&T (ATT) , VSNL, and Bharti Airtel. They also have contracts with multiple providers, so if one fails, the other kicks in. So on Jan. 31, as Reliance announced its problems, rival providers picked up the traffic.
However, smaller back-office outsourcers probably didn't fare as well during the Internet outage. Because these companies compete on price, they are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of contingency plans TCS has with Internet service providers. But even their problems are fairly limited. "Though there is a marginally slower access to Internet, this has not disrupted or affected our operations. Our IT team is working closely with our service providers to ensure that operations continue to function seamlessly," says P.V. Kannan, founder and chief executive of 24/7 Customer, a smaller Bangalore outsourcer.
A day later, says Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Assn. of India, almost 80% of the bandwidth has been restored, as companies made the automatic shift to alternate providers. "The service providers have released more capacity on the Pacific route," he says.
Exactly.
Cable Cutters, 28” Handle, 1 1/4” Jaw
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