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The Effects of the Fibre Outage Throughout the Mediterranean
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 03, 2008 06:27 AM
from the need-some-unclogging-of-the-tubes dept.
from the need-some-unclogging-of-the-tubes dept.
Umar Kalim writes "Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. 'It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.'"
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Who will benefit? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Who will benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Or does someone benefit because they now have the ability to poke through all the traffic that is now being rerouted through their borders?
Re:Who will benefit? (Score:5, Interesting)
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They have the resources for custom made equipment, you know.
I don't think the NSA is too worried about their spying being discovered, as long as the media does not widely publicize it.
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This could be something like: OK, we are going to do something, but we do not want anybody in the world to know about it, so how do we do it? Cut off their intertubes. That way they can not tell anubody else.
Installing a tab you do not do by entering a building and tell the people there is a problem with the phone, after you caused that disturbence. What you do is place the bugs,
Re:taps (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Who will benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, the conspiracy loons are really out for this one. Your "9/11 Truth" action meetings are starting to miss you, guys.
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Re:Who will benefit? (Score:5, Funny)
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Who will "benefit"? (Score:2)
The already-confirmed fact that one clumsy ship can cut off internet access for 75 million people [guardian.co.uk] with one ill-advised drop of the anchor?
So if you're implying the US is somehow behind this with your cutesy little message feigning ignorance, get a life.
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http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm [internettr...report.com]
Looks like Iran is the one loosing *all* internet access... a pure coincidence, I'm sure...
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Here's some more conspiracy fodder for you: a third cable, Falcon, is also damaged [breitbart.com]. Must be the White House!
Oh, wait...it's just the incredible fragility of our undersea cable network finally being embarrassingly exposed.
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So, to clarify, the White House ordered "a ship [...] to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday"? Here's some more conspiracy fodder for you: a third cable, Falcon, is also damaged. Must be the White House! Oh, wait...it's just the incredible fragility of our undersea cable network finally being embarrassingly exposed.
You're right, the media contradicts the idea of a military operation, but this doesn't exclude it absolutely. It's about the time of year when people have been expecting some kind of movement against Iran. Someone's special ops people could well be responsible for this amazing coincidence, and, being clever and special, why would they pass up the confusion of bad weather to get the job done?
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Of course, this still allows for smugglers or whatever. We need more details. Was the cut on a portion of the cable which was suspended? That's easier to do than one that's closer to the ocean floor.
Also, if no visible ship did the cut, that means no SURFACE ship. That only leaves a submar
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True men of genius (Score:5, Insightful)
honestly, where do these idiots come from, and why does it get posted on /.
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Study finds that countries with more international fibre links suffers less when one is cut.
Science isn't only about measuring things we don't think we understand. It's also about measuring things we think we do understand, and seeing if we actually do.
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if a country like Pakistan (and i live in Karachi, Pakistan) can work almost unaffected (we did had an outage for 3-6 ours in some parts including our part of the city) how can India, which has the biggest outsourcing and call center businesses running can't do the same...
FTAS, it seems fairly clear that Pakistan has had a major outage before. So it would seem natural to conclude that Pakistan learned from Pakistan's outage, but India didn't.
Now, India can perhaps add more lines, or it might decide that additional redundancy is not worth the expense, or isn't a priority.
- RG>
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I thought the problem was a slow net.
Observations from Dubai (Score:5, Interesting)
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Slashdot speeds seem to be the same as ever for me. On the other hand, my WoW latency went from 500ms to...well...to some very strange behavior. When I log in, it's at 300ms...and slowly over 5 minutes, it builds up to something like 5000ms, and then disconnects me.
Filesharing over Gnutella2 is down to
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Outside the zones, from my home ping times are over 1100ms to my server in the US. I'm running asterisk with the speex codec. It performs remarkably well despite the lag.
They've also blocked all ports except the web, email, ssh and a few others. Bittorent, and other p2p software isn't working. Youtube wasn't working yesterday, but it is today.
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Holy crap! (Score:4, Interesting)
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It might just be a cover up for incompetency. but I don't buy the three accidental anchor drags story.
There were similar outages due to supposedly broken cables a year (or two?) ago in the Indian ocean, which affected UAE Internet services. Those cables were dozens of kilometers apart too.
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An anchor drag accross two cables in the Mediterranean is quite plausible, but what about the third one off the coast of Dubai in less than a week? That's not even the same sea.
Gambler's fallacy. A random event happening does not affect the future probability of the random event happening. And why would it be in the same sea? We're talking about separate ships here.
It might just be a cover up for incompetency. but I don't buy the three accidental anchor drags story.
Two. Two anchor drags.
There were similar outages due to supposedly broken cables a year (or two?) ago in the Indian ocean, which affected UAE Internet services. Those cables were dozens of kilometers apart too.
The cables in the Mediterranean were only a few hundred meters apart near the shore where they were cut. They're only sending one ship to fix both.
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Of course, that still leaves smuggler ships or whatever. We don't know if the cut was in a portion of the cable suspended closer to the surface, which is more vulnerable than cables nearer the ocean floor.
But as of now
SEAMEWE? (Score:5, Funny)
The Effects of the Fibre Outage (Score:2, Funny)
single point of failure (Score:3, Insightful)
When I was doing work on resilient architectures for companies, we were always telling then to install redundant and diverse cables, so 1 accident wouldn't chop all their connections.
It looks like this lesson has not been fully learned.
Re:single point of failure (Score:5, Informative)
There are at least 60 separate landing spots on the east coast of north america, from Miami up into Newfoundland. All those cables that look like they go to NY actually land at various spots on long island and in NJ, but then get hauled overland into the data centers in the NY area.
There is as much redundancy and diversity as could be engineered in, given the budget constraints that the fibre system has to some day earn a profit. Undersea topography plays a big part as well, certain parts of the ocean just can't be used to safely lay fibre upon. There is also a need to avoid busy ports and shipping lanes. All taken into consideration when financing a US$1Billion cable.
I already posted in a previous thread about the Suez Canal, where many
the AC
Parent
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Does that last sentence say what you meant it to say? That in the short haul, underwater cables are cheaper than landed one? Just curious because it would seem backwards, especially as layin
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Re:single point of failure (Score:5, Informative)
Over land, rights of way can be quite expensive. Under sea, once away from a coastline, a fibre doesn't require any property rights payments.
Over land, fibre runs are not very well protected in some areas, often attracting the evil backhoe or other dangerous mechanica. What makes fibre on land cheap is the ability to put in easily to maintain repeaters and dispersion compensators, and electricity can be obtained locally. Repairs are also relatively cheap and rapid.
Under water and once away from the immediate coastline, there isn't much dangerous to fibres except boat anchors, and the occasional earthquake caused rockfall. Fibre runs, still need active electronics every 80 to 300 Kms to boost the signal, shape it, or compensate for dispersion. To power electronics far away out to sea, the only place to put electricity is at the landing point. The longest Pacific Ocean fibres require something like 25,000 volts at 10 amps from each end to power the most distant repeaters. That means the first sections of a fibre support cladding need to carry huge currents and have large dielectrics to prevent arc-overs.
If you can build additional landing points to provide electricity, you can build cheaper fibres. With the most recent advances in optic fibre quality, a run up to 200 Kms doesn't even need repeaters, some manufacturers are claiming 320 Kms without a repeater with the most modern optics powering the signal. That makes short run underwater fibres about the same cost with less risks of cuts.
the AC
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Amy I the only one? (Score:2)
"overseas" (Score:2)
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To be serious there is a flow on effect and these cables are long. A backhoe near Seattle cut most of Australia off the net just a month or two ago.
and Pakistan has all that fiber because (Score:2)
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Oh the humanity! (Score:2)
Imagine the chaos that would ensue if South Korea had all of its connections (or a fair amount of them) severed. On the one hand, I'm sure productivity would be hampered by their network speeds slowing down dramatically (if the fair amount), or completely (if all were severed.) On the othe hand, I'm sure there would be a giant spike in non-computer activities as Starcraft servers see their workloads dr
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Re:Ameircans much? (Score:4, Funny)
They really just wanted to sell hummus without people realizing that's what Arabs eat.
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