Wired Blog Network 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.
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