Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

[Sapiens]

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/stor...8A120DC16D9%7D

Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez


Last update: 5:10 a.m. EST Feb. 1, 2008
DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--A third undersea fibre optic cable running through the Suez to Sri Lanka was cut Friday, said a Flag official.
Two other fiber optic cables owned by Flag Telecom and consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 located near Alexandria, Egypt, were damaged Wednesday leading to a slowdown in Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and South Asia.
"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.
"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.
There are conflicting reports of how the two Alexandria cables were cut. Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while du (DU.AIDU.AI
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DU.AI) , the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
"It's ship anchoring," said the Flag official.
-By Tahani Karrar, Dow Jones Newswires, +9714 364 4965 Tahani.Karrar@dowjones.com
Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 01, 2008 05:09 ET (10:09 GMT)
-Contact: 201-938-5400

Iran is out of the loop: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Where's the USS Jimmy Carter?

[Mega]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Why would somebody do this?...................was it that e-mail i sent a week last thursday?
Mike

[Verrocchio]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Seems there are unusual levels of anchor dragging in those waters, Matey!

(Beautiful chart, Sapiens!)

[GRG55]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

I can confirm that something has happened, as my ADSL response is all over the map - reasonably fast this morning, nearly zero mid-afternoon, starting to pick up again in last 45 minutes. Same fluctuations all week...

[Sapiens]

fourth cable break

Internet problems continue with fourth cable break

http://www.arabianbusiness.com/51013...le-break?ln=en

by Dylan Bowman and AFP on Sunday, 03 February 2008

PROBLEMS CONTINUE: A fourth undersea telecoms cable has been damaged between Qatar and the UAE. (Getty Images)
Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted because of damage to an undersea telecoms cable linking the Gulf state to the UAE, the fourth such incident in less than a week.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday.

The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.

It is expected to take at least "a few days" to fix, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.

The damage caused major problems for internet users in Qatar over the weekend, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission.

It is not yet clear how badly telecom and internet services have been affected in the UAE. Etisalat is expected to release a statement on Monday.

Parts of the Gulf Arab region were plunged into a virtual internet blackout on Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast.

The initial breaches were in segments of two intercontinental cables known as Sea-ME-We-4 and Flag Europe-Asia.

The situation was made worse on Friday when Flag, part of India's Reliance Communications, revealed a third cable, Falcon, had also been damaged off the UAE coast.

Etisalat said it does not use the Falcon cable and is therefore unaffected, but the UAE's second telco, Du, warned the damage could hamper its efforts to restore normal service to customers. Etisalat said it is helping Du minimise disruption.

Flag said a repair ship was expected to arrive at the location of the third damaged cable in the next few days, but bad weather has prevented the vessel from setting off from Abu Dhabi port.

The ship is now expected to depart Monday morning and the repairs should take five days.

The third cable is located 56 kilometres from Dubai on a segment between the UAE and Oman.

Etisalat said it had been informed by Flag Telecom, which operates one of the two damaged cables in the Mediterranean Sea, that the problem should be fixed in two weeks, while the operator of the other cable planned to carry out repairs on February 8.

Flag said on Saturday a ship should reach the cable repair ground by February 5.

Two weeks of net disruption - Etisalat
UAE telecom says it has been informed damaged undersea cable could take up to two weeks to repair.

Internet crisis deepens
Third undersea cable break between UAE and Oman adds to web woes after two breaks just days earlier.

[c1ue]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Let me put on my tin foil hat with Leadite (tm):

That's one way to foil al Qaeda's internet based management system...

[Verrocchio]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Let me put on my tin foil hat with Leadite (tm):

That's one way to foil al Qaeda's internet based management system...

If coincidence is ruled out as an explanation (and the use of tin foil hats to foil al Qaeda, what plausible reasons might remain for these nearly simultaneous breaks?

[c1ue]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

It might be a brilliant way to foil an impending Terminator scale internet assault, or it might just be 3 ships dropping anchors at the wrong places, at the same time.

[oddlots]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Here's abit of debunking that sounds reasonable:

http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/...sconne_1.shtml

Anyone want to buy some canned peaches?

[Verrocchio]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

The mystery continues...


International Herald Tribune
Ruptures call safety of Internet cables into question


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.

Full article: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/...ogy/cables.php

[Verrocchio]

Cable FIVE Has Been Cut

The mystery continues...

...and deepens (pun intended)

Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East

Undersea cable owners still won't speculate on cause of cable cuts

[c1ue]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Or better yet: Saudi Arabia's new nuclear powered submarine is undergoing testing, and keeps running over those pesky cables at the bottom of the ocean...

[c1ue]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Darn, another lovely conspiracy theory killed by ugly reality...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/02..._fix_forecast/

Seabed cables will be fixed by next week

But more will break - it's normal

By Lewis Page → More by this author
Published Friday 8th February 2008 12:21 GMT
Find out how your peers are dealing with Virtualization
The three - yes, just three - seabed telecoms cables which were broken in two (only two) recent incidents are expected to be fixed by next week, according to the operating companies. The ongoing tinfoil-hat frenzy that has followed the outages may take longer to die down.
Reuters reports that Indian telco cable subsidiary FLAG said yesterday that its line north of Egypt would be sorted by Sunday. The adjacent SEA-ME-WE 4 cable should be done tomorrow, according to its owner Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd. The third break, suffered by the FLAG-owned FALCON line between Dubai and Oman, should also be fixed over the weekend.
Seabed telecomms cable faults are actually a routine event, occuring twice a week according to industry experts. Most breaks result from human activities such as commercial fishing or ships' anchors dragging, but others are caused by storms. There are even a few cases (pdf, page 32) recorded of sharks biting through lines. The introduction of modern high-bandwidth fibre has meant that there is a tendency toward single points of failure, but in most cases alternative routes can be used and users never notice a problem.
The two breaks north of Cairo gained wide attention, however, as they initially caused severe disruption to traffic between Asia and Europe. The third break, followed by a power cut which briefly disabled a further Gulf line and an erroneous newpaper report claiming a fifth outage, saw tinfoil hats donned worldwide. The stampede gained such momentum that even respected analysts were caught up.
Fortunately the mainstream news services seem now to have stopped reporting breathlessly on every submarine outage. With luck, the conspiracy bloggers will soon wipe the spittle from their monitors and find something else to get excited about. ®

[Verrocchio]

Re: Intelligence Brief:Third undersea cable reportedly cut between Sri Lanka, Suez

Darn, another lovely conspiracy theory killed by ugly reality...

What exactly is the lovely conspiracy theory that you refer to? To note that coincidence is an improbable explanation for an event leaves open the possibility of conjecture or theory development, but is far short of a conspiracy theory.

Also, your source is in conflict with Friday's Wall street Journal. On the front page, they report that "...four cable outages in the Middle East... recently disrupted Internet connections... The article is silent on the issue of the cause of the cuts, but did provide an explanation of how the cables are laid that may be of interest to some. They explained that fiber cables are laid on the ocean floor until they reach shallower waters near land. Then they dig a trench and lay the cable six feet or more under the sea bed.

More relevant to the iTulip thesis is the main point of the article, that Internet usage is soaring, with global bandwidth usage climbing an average of 50% a year since 2002. The surplus capacity (dark fiber) has absorbed these increases, but if the trend continues, billions of dollars for new cable will be needed -- and soon.