Middle East, Asia, Algeria lose internet access after cable cuts

[Al-khiyal]

Middle East and Asia lose internet access after cable fails

January 30, 2008 -- Huge swathes of the Middle East and Asia have been left without internet access after a vital undersea cable was damaged.

A fault in the pipeline, which runs between Sicily and Egypt, has dramatically reduced access in countries including Saudi Arabia, Dubai and India, leaving millions of workers struggling to get online.

It is not yet clear what is wrong with the undersea cable, but the effects are already being felt across the region. Reports from the Middle East suggest that most countries are almost completely without access to the internet, while authorities in Mumbai have said that more than half of India's bandwidth has been lost.

"There has been a 50 to 60% cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Charia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Reuters.

The outage could have drastic impacts around the globe. Not only will the lack of connectivity strike the technology industry, including India's so-called Silicon City of Bangalore, but the banking industry is also likely to suffer as stock markets struggle to complete international trades.

Despite the vast number of individuals who have access to the web, nearly all the internet's traffic is routed through a small number of cables submerged deep below the planet's sea beds.

In 2003, net access in western Europe was hit by a fault in a cable running between the US and France, while communications in Asia were severely disrupted in 2006 by seismic activity.

An earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale occurred off the coast of Taiwan, and damaged cables connecting South Korea, China, Japan and Singapore. As well as leaving two people dead, the outage severely reduced internet access and other communications for several days.

[Al-khiyal]

Fiber optic cable cuts isolate millions from Internet, future cuts likely

January 31, 2008 -- Large swaths of the Middle East and Southeast Asia fell into internet darkness after two major underseas fiber optic links were damaged off Egypt's coast on Wednesday.

Early reports blamed an errant anchor for severing the cables, but THREAT LEVEL has not yet been able to confirm that's the cause.

Telecoms in Egypt, India, Pakistan and Kuwait (among others) are scrambling to find other arrangements to carry their internet and long distance phone traffic.

Some telecoms had complete outages since their contingency plans if one cable broke was to use the other. Seventy percent of the networks in Pakistan experienced an out, with Egypt, Malidives, Kuwait, Lebanon and Algeria also suffering severe outages, according to traffic analysis by Renesys.

The cuts hit two fiber optic links: FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE-4. The two cables are competitors that carry traffic from Europe through the Middle East along to Japan (and vice versa).

FLAG runs about 17,000 miles, stretching from London, through the Suez canal, around India, along China's coast to Japan.

When it was built, the network so impressed sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson that he wrote a 56-page article for Wired magazine's December 1996 issue.

SEA-ME-WE-4 follows roughly the same geographic path.

Given the desire by telecoms and broadband customers to keep costs low, situations like the current cuts will continue to happen, according to Todd Underwood, a Vice President at Renesys, which provides internet information analysis to the majority of the world's largest telecoms.

"Part of the lesson here is that there will always be outages," Underwood said. "This is all about money - how much money do we want to pay to make sure the network doesn't go down? We are used to thinking of the internet as being a thing that goes down."

The cost of having fully redundant back-ups connections that aren't physically near each other in chokepoints like Egypt's Suez canal is just too high for commercial operations, according to Underwood.

"We have chosen to deal with these outages to get a much much better cost," Underwood says.

That's not to say the outages don't have consequences.

In December 2006, 4 major fiber optic lines were severely damaged following a major earthquake in Taiwan. Subsequent underwater mudslides damaged 9 cables laid in the Luzon Strait south of Taiwan. The cuts basically erased all eastward data routes from Southeast Asia. It took 49 days for crews on 11 giant cable-laying ships to fix all of the 21 damage points, according to the International Cable Protection Committee.

In response, telecoms shifted business away from North America-based backbone providers like AT&T, Level 3 and Savis and towards European carriers, according to Underwood.

But this go round, the North American carriers might gain from this outage, Underwood suggests.

Network patterns can also physically change after a giant outage. For instance, after seeing the damage in the Taiwan earthquake, a longer, slower and more expensive route around the Philippines suddenly started to appear more attractive, according to Underwood.

THREAT LEVEL would love to give a shout-out to the aviation fear-mongering blog Aviation Nation for hinting that this was the work of terrorists.

[Al-khiyal]

How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people

[Bent_Bladi]

hey what is it w/ drunk boat drivers, huh?

[Al-khiyal]

Third undersea Internet cable damaged in Mideast: Indian firm

NEW DELHI, February 2, 2008 (AFP) — A third undersea Internet cable has been damaged in the Middle East, adding to the disruption in online services after two other lines were cut earlier this week, the cable operating firm said.

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner, FLAG Telecom, which is part of India's Reliance Communications.

The repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the company said on its website.

Flag Telecom owns another cable that was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday. A repair ship was expected to arrive by Tuesday to restore that cable and repairs were expected to take a week, the company said.

The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.

[Al-khiyal]

Ruptures call safety of Internet cables into question

NEW DELHI, February 4, 2008: Four undersea communication cables have been cut in the past week, raising questions about the safety of the oceanic network that handles the bulk of the world's Internet and telephone traffic.

Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related.

One theory - that a wayward ship traveling off course because of bad weather was responsible for cutting the first two cables last week - was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend.

No ships passed the area in the Mediterranean where the cables were located, the country's Ministry of Communications said Sunday.

"This has been an eye-opener for us, and everyone in the telecom industry worldwide," said Colonel R.S. Parihar, the secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India.

Today, the cause of the problem may have been an anchor, "but what if it is sabotage tomorrow?" Parihar asked.

"These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables."

Most recently, a cable operated by Qatar's Q-Tel, which linked Qatar to the United Arab Emirates through the islands of Haloul and Das, was cut Friday.

Communications in the Middle East have been hardest hit by the damage, though India, the United States and Europe also experienced slowdowns.

Telecommunications operators have been trying to diversify the routes they can use for transmissions in recent years, said Alan Mauldin, research director with TeleGeography Research, particularly since an earthquake in Taiwan in 2006 disrupted service in Asia.

The cable network contains "choke points" - like those off the coast of Egypt and Singapore where many cables run - and operators need to make sure their transmission routes are diversified, he said.

Adel al Mutawa, a spokesman for Q-Tel, said Qatar was operating at about 60 percent of telephone capacity Monday, but that Internet and data transmission services were working at normal speed.

Most telecommunications companies affected by the cuts during the past week rerouted service through other cables.

Q-Tel will not know what caused the Qatar-UAE Submarine Cable System rupture until it sends a repair ship to pull the cable off the ocean floor, Mutawa said.

Undersea cables carry about 95 percent of the world's telephone and Internet traffic, according to the International Cable Protection Committee, an 86-member group that works with fishing, mining and drilling companies to curb damage to submarine cables.

Information travels faster and less expensively under the ocean than it does via satellite, and undersea cable transmission is gaining market share, the group said.

The Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said Sunday that no ships had passed through the area in the Mediterranean where two cables, known as the Sea Me We 4 and Flag's Europe-Asia cable, were cut earlier last week.

"The site is a restricted area, which excludes the possibility that the malfunction resulted from a crossing ship," the ministry said in a statement. Internet efficiency in Egypt has reached about 70 percent, the statement said.

A third cable, known as Falcon, was cut Friday morning about 55 kilometers, or 35 miles, off the coast of Dubai in the Gulf. Wet, windy weather in some areas around the Gulf has shut ports and delayed ships.

Two of the damaged cables, the Flag Europe-Asia cable and Falcon, are owned by Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group.

Flag Telecom has never had two cables down at the same time in the region, a spokesman, Vineet Kumar, said.

Flag Telecom's network is one of the "newest in existence" so it would be unlikely that the cables would break because of wear and tear or age.

[amalgamate]

I never thought of internet cables traveling through under sea. This is a catastrophe.