"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back.
The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data,
everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya
Dow Jones.
The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the
Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
etc etc.
There's an interesting article at
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Internet-Outages-Cables.html
on cable chokepoints.
"NEW YORK (AP) -- The lines that tie the globe together by carrying
phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick
where they lie on the ocean floor."
This article is somewhat "misleading". Semantics, but it set the tone
of the article for me and probably most of the public.
The cables are able to have their physical characteristics changed by
the ability to splice joints into the cable and connect two physically
disparate ends to serve specific purposes related bottom geologies,
depth, and other dangers. Different cable types are deployed to
mitigate different risks such as fishing, quakes, slides, etc. The
lightweight cable may be thinner, but is used in less risky settings
like massive depths. When you get to something like heavy weight
armored on the edge of a fishing ground or winding through a
treacherous bottom geology, your're talking much larger diameters and
much more weight, as Rod Beck had mentioned previously.
There are many variables that go into route selection and cabling
which impact type. Cost is one.
-M<
The Submarine Cable Improvement Group
has plenty of details about trends in submarine cable damage and
improvements in submarine cable protection.
“NEW YORK (AP) – The lines that tie the globe together by carrying
phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick
where they lie on the ocean floor.”
This article is somewhat “misleading”. Semantics, but it set the tone
of the article for me and probably most of the public.
The cables are able to have their physical characteristics changed by
the ability to splice joints into the cable and connect two physically
disparate ends to serve specific purposes related bottom geologies,
depth, and other dangers. Different cable types are deployed to
mitigate different risks such as fishing, quakes, slides, etc. The
lightweight cable may be thinner, but is used in less risky settings
like massive depths. When you get to something like heavy weight
armored on the edge of a fishing ground or winding through a
treacherous bottom geology, your’re talking much larger diameters and
much more weight, as Rod Beck had mentioned previously.
There are many variables that go into route selection and cabling
which impact type. Cost is one.
-M<
Weight is a bigger issue than most people realize. In order to lift a cable out of the water and onto the deck of a Global Marine or Tyco Submarine ship, it has be cut and the two segments lifted out of the water, spliced, and then a ‘joint’ is placed at the splice point. The weight of even a thin cable is too great to be lifted without being cut in two.
Weight is a bigger issue than most people realize.
perhaps folk would benefit from [re]reading Neal Stephenson's wonderful classic bit of gonzo journalism in Wired, <http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html>\.
randy
perhaps my favorite magazine article of all time.
Dorn Hetzel wrote:
perhaps my favorite magazine article of all time.
the original came with pictures <sigh>. i tried the wayback machine, but could not find a version with them. 
i guess i should wget the great ones with pics before they fade. but i just can't archive everything. and there are copyright issues anyway.
randy
this (3 undersea cables in about a week, serving the same geographic
area, with two of the cuts happening on the same day!) is leaving the
realm of improbability and approaching the realm of conspiracy ...
(either that, or the backhoe operators' union has decided there's
better money to be made on water than on land.)
Not at all, there have been cables in the water since 1858 (first TransAtlantic cable - telegraph). Right now there are 80 major cables out there.
Give yourself 170 years of undersea cables and calculate the odds.
Roderick S. Beck
Director of European Sales
Hibernia Atlantic
1, Passage du Chantier, 75012 Paris
http://www.hiberniaatlantic.com
Wireless: 1-212-444-8829.
Landline: 33-1-4346-3209.
French Wireless: 33-6-14-33-48-97.
AOL Messenger: GlobalBandwidth
rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com
rodbeck@erols.com
``Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.’’ Albert Einstein.
Yah. I'm a security guy, and hence suspicious by nature -- our slogan
is "Paranoia is our Profession" -- and I'm getting very concerned. The
old saying comes to mind: "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,
but the third time is enemy action". The alternative some common mode
failure -- perhaps the storm others have noted.
--Steve Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb
hm. I wonder what the odds are (I don't have enough figures to do the
math myself):
80 cables worldwide (first time I'd heard that figure, actually)
X square miles of shipping lanes
Y ships in those lanes
Z square miles of overlap between shipping lanes and cable run
# of times, on average, a ship drops anchor outside of a port
maybe there's a lot more overlap in shipping lanes and cable runs than
I thought ...
(or maybe we just got unlucky, and we'll have a nice long period of no
undersea cuts following these :))
> (either that, or the backhoe operators' union has decided there's
> better money to be made on water than on land.)
Guys named Bubba can get fishing licenses just as easily as backhoe
drivers' licenses.
One of my customers in the forestry business ran their own cables
along their railroad tracks,
and every year during hunting season they'd have problems with guys named Bubba
shooting at birds on the cables at bridge crossings.
Yah. I'm a security guy, and hence suspicious by nature -- our slogan
is "Paranoia is our Profession" -- and I'm getting very concerned. The
old saying comes to mind: "once is happenstance, twice is coincidence,
but the third time is enemy action".
My business card often says "Technical Marketing", which means I'm supposed
to have some wide-grinning explanation about sychronicity of root causes;
obviously this is some problem with ship navigation software not using
the correct GPS datum,
so it's a common-mode operator-interface error that's not the fault of
either the telcos or Vendor C's or J's equipment. Funny how Iran's
just accidentally fallen off the net, though.
I forget the French and Arabic equivalent names for Bubba, but I still
think it's him and Murphy.
More productively, there are real concerns with the cable routing
around India and Pakistan. Connections across Egypt have geographical
constraints that are probably more significant than the political
ones, but having most of the connectivity into western India going
into Mumbai and not Cochin or Bangalore and only having one drop into
Pakistan are risks that ought to be fixed. In large part they're a
heritage of telecomms monopolies, and are theoretically fixable, but
both countries are at some risk until they do something about it.
It may just be the normal growing pains networks go through as they reach
a certain size and those "minor" problems become "major" problems. When
the Internet was sparser in the USA, we had similar "concindences."
1997: Backhoes in Concert
http://www.nanog.org/nanog-tshirts/nanog11.jpg
Quite a few other lists I look at (especially those with a "critical
infrastructure protection" type focus - seem to feel the same as you
do. And at least one list has already started the "maybe al qaeda is
behind this" idea running.
The fun part is that quite a lot of these cables are in international
waters, so it just might turn into a high level multiple UN agency
conference, sooner or later with ideas like a bunch of navy or coast
guard cutters tasked to patrol on the borders of cable landing areas
and head off shipping that wants to anchor, trawlers that want to drag
nets across the ocean floor, bubba driving his backhoe ship .. [and
that still doesnt keep away sharks that want to sharpen their teeth on
undersea cables...]
srs
"NEW YORK (AP) -- The lines that tie the globe together by carrying
phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick
where they lie on the ocean floor."
And AFAIK not all kilometers of cables lie on the ocean floor; if the
ocean has high depth on a given part of the cable route, the cable
simply floats on the water on that run. It's just a matter of having
enough pressure to lift it up.
Rubens
And AFAIK not all kilometers of cables lie on the ocean floor; if the
ocean has high depth on a given part of the cable route, the cable
simply floats on the water on that run. It's just a matter of having
enough pressure to lift it up.
and for the difficult parts, they pump helium in and get it above flight paths.
randy
$quoted_author = "Scott Francis" ;
maybe there's a lot more overlap in shipping lanes and cable runs than
I thought ...
In confined waters like the Suez, Red Sea et. al. there is a lot of overlap.
Which makes three cables cuts in that area during bad weather not such a
stretch of the imagination.
Open waters like trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific have less overlap with
shipping lanes but still need to cross fishing areas etc.etc. But you'd be a
little more suspicious if those sites had a similar cluster of cuts unless
there was something in common (i.e. same landing station, cuts close to
shore).
cheers
marty
Randy Bush wrote:
Dorn Hetzel wrote:
perhaps my favorite magazine article of all time.
the original came with pictures <sigh>. i tried the wayback machine, but could not find a version with them.
i guess i should wget the great ones with pics before they fade. but i just can't archive everything. and there are copyright issues anyway.
randy
An interesting line from page 10 of the article:
"Diversity is not needed in the deep ocean, but land crossings are viewed as considerably more risky."
This philosophy should probably be rethought somewhat, as we may have discovered this past week.
