Slashdot Mirror
A Hole In the Net, Down Under
cjm_in_oz writes: "Since 4pm yesterday, Australia's leading ISP has lost 60% of its bandwidth due to either an earthquake, or as is more likely, a ship's anchor. Read more here ." Most of the entire continent's bandwidth, you see, courses through a particular manhole ... sheesh. This sure sounds like an argument for more and more fiber, along different courses.
from the article:
"...circumstantial evidence suggests this species is a member of the DSL community..."
Mmmmm, high-bandwidth sharks...
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
cheers ;)
I've worked out why I thought so...
:)
( from http://www.aarnet.edu.a u/c orporate/history/sinclair.html )
Geoff Huston, the first manager of AARNet...
After early ISPs like Connect, Western Australia's Dialix and the now-defunct RUNX in Sydney set up, and browsers and the Web kicked in to keep bandwith use growing. Telstra eventually bought out the backbone in 1995, leaving AARNet with its original universities and CSIRO.
Huston, who is now Telstra's manger of data networks...
See, they did have something nefarious happen there
deus does not exist but if he does
Telstra has several million enemies. Their marketing division try to spin things a bit tho' - they refer to them as customers.
:/
:)
Things haven't changed from the days of Telecom Australia, have they?
"Making it easy" for them to rip you off, is all they do -- and they drag their feet with all their anti-competitive acts (local loop access is the most recent example) -- and they get into bed with Rupert Murdoch (Foxtel) while still government-owned -- and I could go on...
Anyway, no real point, I just wanted to vent some at Telstra
deus does not exist but if he does
You buy underwate cable thats desigined to last underwater for 25 years, then you can forget about it for 25 years.
:)
Except when things like this happen, of course.
deus does not exist but if he does
This is just a cover story for the AU government's new censorship system. As they get the bugs worked out, the speed will come back, and they will claim to have "fixed" the cable....
www.eFax.com are spammers
The captain of an American container ship off the coast of Indonesia is reported to have said "Whoops, my bad" and totally tried to play the whole thing off.
EOF
You heard wrong. Optus have their own backbone, and it's pretty good (not that I can remember figures or where to find them). Most Universities on the AARNET and NSWRNO are now on the Optus backbone. I have a dialup account on dingoblue, who use optus's backbone and modem racks, and hardly noticed anything wrong last night.
Most? Half at the most. And who'd use Telstra anyway, the company with almost monopolistic powers.
But a lot of ISPs probably buy bandwidth from Telstra or their resellers (if they can't get better deals elsewhere).
And don't Telstra administer AARNET? I seem to remember they took that over when connect.com.au went full-on commercial...
deus does not exist but if he does
Obviously.
As Telstra is already Australia's primary telco, they already have substantial land rights and holdings. That is, they already operate most of the telephone poles and undergrond lines.
You're a suburbanite.
Has anyone read the article? The run of fibre is called SEA-ME-WE 3.. See me wee.. Three? Is it just me, or is this a really amusing name for something at the bottom of the ocean?
Anyone having this problem firsthand?
:)
Things were a bit slow for me on the night it happened, but this was probably Telstra's router problems as well. (This is an SA ISP using Telstra's backbone). It's been fine since then... of course, I'm unsure of whether my ISP has back-up supply arrangements, they do seem to go for the multiple degrees of redundancy, belt&suspenders type approach, which is nice
deus does not exist but if he does
The vulnerability and high cost of cables is one reason the infosphere wants to be in orbit. Hardening satellites against nuclear electromagnetic pulse attacks has, however, been inadequately addressed outside of military satellites. The bulk of the hardening can occur with a relatively light-weight faraday cage enclosure so it shouldn't add too much to the mass budget of the satellite.
Seastead this.
Its amazing that such a fine example of fault-tolerent design can become so weak that a backhoe, anchor, or small localized earthquake can successfully disable so much capacity!
:)
It cost big heap money to lay cables across big, deep oceans. Who's going to lay more than they can afford to?
deus does not exist but if he does
Hell, it's a freaking 13/14h flight from Sydney to LA or ~12 from Aukland to LA (which is odd as it's ~3h from Sydney to Aukland and they're on a similar latitude).
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
A lot of people are saying that yes, Telstra has ONLY lost 60% of their international connectivity.
Let's put it into perspective.
Telstra currently have 980Mbps of international connectivity. They have lost their largest link, 622Mbps worth, so they need to route around the problem.
It's not that simple.
The moment the link died, it wrecked havoc with BGP routes everywhere. I couldn't get outside my ISPs own network (optus) to Telstra for around one and a half hours. Yes, true, other ISPs here also have int'l bandwidth, but it hardly compares to the near gigabit that Telstra have.
Any southern-cross delivered bandwidth has yet to be utilized since customers (i.e. the ISPs) are either waiting for their connection or are still playing around with the configuration (read: playing Quake III with sub-150msec latency before the cable is loaded). Optus/CW, MCI and NZ Telecom are *shareholders* basically. They still have to purchase their own bandwidth (and line their pockets with money after a while). Telstra has got Southern Cross cable capacity too but just like the smaller ISPs who might only have a few megabits, they don't *own* the cable.
Thankfully, I'm on the optus@home cable modem service so I don't need to touch Telstra int'l bandwidth but connectivity to local sites is still erratic.
Now, stop slashdotting our link -
11 FastEthernet0-0-0.pad18.Sydney.telstra.net (139.130.249.239) * 376/383/401 (6.78) ms 9/10 pkts (10% loss)
12 * * * * * 0/5 pkts (100% loss)
13 * * * * * 0/5 pkts (100% loss)
-tsg
And a couple of additional bits of information:
First their bandwidth gets shopped, now we /. the continent. Sooner or later those aussies are gonna get ticked...
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
The cause of the damage, which occurred approximately 100km from Singapore on the ocean floor, could not be confirmed. Possible causes include a ship's anchor or minor earthquake.
Now at last the truth can be told.
http://tbtf.com/pics/subhoe.jpg
_______________________________________________
Keith Dawson
Layer of ash separates morning and evening milk.
With the ownership like that, the bandwidth is also spread something like that, and the owners of each particular portion are able to sell it to whoever wants it. So my guess for the slowdown, is that the Aussie ISP is not the 40% owner and hence can't use the new Sothern Cross bandwidth.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
lol....almost made me wet my pants! however, I have a correction:
Shipping is warned to avoid the slick as several ships have already gone down in the area....should read "Shipping is warned to avoid the slick as several ships have already been gone down on in the area, and are now sleeping somewhere offshore."
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Going on means going far
Going far means returning
Do they carry more than 83% of the traffic? Well, did they, before their cable received an unauthorized vasectomy?
0.83 * 0.60 = 0.498
I'm picky.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
...but 60% of total bandwidth available to the ISP called Telstra. Their backup line was flooded and 1 in 3 requests where lost. "Other ISPs and networks such as Optus were uncongested." It is very intresting that this same line connects so many distant contries (Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Germany, UK and the USA). I was under the impression that connections are made between contries, and then those contries in turn connect to others. I find it very interesting that so many contries are all on one pipe! ARPANET was originally supposed to be 'multi-node-failure-tolerent' so that many whole-cities could be destroyed (atomic strike or whatnot) with the system continiously delivering packets successfully (unless the destination is the one destroyed!) by re-routing around failures. Its amazing that such a fine example of fault-tolerent design can become so weak that a backhoe, anchor, or small localized earthquake can successfully disable so much capacity!
Here's another link, which provides a slightly less technical... erm... 'explanation'.
With cartoon.
http://obaba.shafted.com.au/
Funny retort (though not timely!).
Hey, that's the requirement of one of our customers. So be it. Obviously, we don't recommend it but...it's their call.
Hence, "experienced developers"...some who've dealt with obscene constraints and succeeded.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
they will put connections into apartment blocks.
assuming you live on the east coast. i'm in adelaide, i have a foxtel cable socket in my wall, but there ain't no way they'll sell me net access through it.
why? because optus stopped their cable rollout when they ran out of money. stupid, stupid telstra... if this were a true competitive regime, i'd be able to get access over 33.6Kbps (I have a 56k modem that doesn't work, phone line is too bad).
deus does not exist but if he does
Map of SE-ME-WE 3.
Lets not jump to any conspiracy theory!
The link that is damaged goes into the opposite direction (South East Asia, Middle East and then Europe). The new Southern Cross Cable that came in operation last week goes to the USA.
"Canberra Technology" - 139,000
The same queen who heartlessly wrings the necks of pheasants, no less! http://mo re. abcnews.go.com/sections/world/dailynews/britain001 120.html.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Disclaimer: sure, I lived in Australia for 7 years (in Queensland :/, bloody banana benders (my mom's a cockroach (dad and I are Canadian));), but that was 6 years ago (in NZ during that time) and now I'm in Canada, so my grasp of .au stats is way rusty.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
What happened to that big, redundant connection that we were all bantering about a few days past?
----
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
Firstly, it's a whole hell of a lot easier (though still a bit of a pain) to lay terrestrial cable. Example: Qwest just slapped a plow on a train car and furrowed trenches along rail lines all around the US. Stuff in cable, backfill, and you're done (more or less). You can't really do that with submarine cable. You can also do end-run tricks with microwave and laser for cheap further expansion.
Though the link was already posted, I'll post it again. It's a splendid article Neal Stephenson wrote for Wired, and if you want to hear more than you wanted about laying cable, read it.
So what you've got is relatively cheap terrestrial links, but when you start talking trans-oceanic, then things get hairy, both in effort and money terms. So you only have a few outbound connections from the continent, which means one anchor/earthquake/curious competitor (read the article) and there goes your connectivity.
Note that Arpanet was meant to protect the US military network in times of chaos (i.e. armageddon). It really isn't an issue that overseas connectivity is a somewhat fragile link, since in times of war, it's only the national network that matters.
As for routing issues, well, there are all sorts of wack payment issues at the backbone level. At the top level, the paths that packets take are determined by business agreements rather than efficiency. So you'd have to get on the horn to your competition and beg and plead for assistance (banks do it; they loan each other money all the time and at pretty decent rates, although telcos might enjoy raping each other when asked for help). Also you may get into weird latency issues if you route US traffic over a cable destined for, say India and then somehow on to the US (maybe).
Caveat: This could all be bullshit. Comments?
-- "I am disrespectful to dirt. Can you not see that I am serious!"
I mean, I've experienced the MAE West packet loss and such, but at least my packets could move on to other ISPs.
Of course, the article was a little sketchey on details. Does anyone know?
Bleh!
SO that when one gets cut, the other takes over. The STM protocol happily can accomadate this.
Then again, building redundant transcontinental lines are not a trivial thing....
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Ekkkk.. that's not good.
That's like there being a car wreck someplace in the U.S. and UUNet going down because of it. This reminds me though, of that article I read once, where the sharkes were eating the fiber optic cable, cause they liked the taste of the gel inside it.
(sorry don't know where a link to the story is)
Other ISPs and networks such as Optus were uncongested.
I use Optus, Australia's 2nd biggest telecommunications company. I have no problems. I also don't like Telstra all that much, so I'd be happy if this loses them some customers.
Fuck Telstra and avoid them like the plague. Your local calls are cheaper elsewhere, your STD calls are cheaper elsewhere, your mobile calls are cheaper elsewhere, your International calls are cheaper elsewhere, and your Internet access is not only cheaper elsewherethen their overpriced Big Pond, but is now faster, more stable and more reliable though a company like Optus with the new link.
Xenex
- Who has been totally Telstra free for over 15 months, and had loved it.
You can't build redundancy with a single cable. They shoulda ran two cables, one from like American Samoa. heh
Who is smarter: us or them?
--
Spelling by m-w.com.
Which brings me to the question. Why lay the cable from Floreat Beach which is in the Southwest, all the way to Singapore? Leaving the mainland from say, Exmouth would have saved about 1500 Km of that cable!
Somebody should check to make sure the captain of that ship doesn't own stock in MCI (one of the three companies who built the new 120 Gb pipeline)...
One day we'll develop a technology that transmits at those speeds but travels like nutrinos (I think thats the sub atomic particle Im thinking of...) that arent affected by earth's crust and links the continents that way... Of course we haven't thought of a way to do that yet, so I'll just sit here and dream about it. :)
When an ISP is operating under limited bandwidth, the LAST thing you want to do is POST A STORY ON SLASHDOT POINTING TO A WEB SERVER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PIPE, restricting said bandwidth even further. *sigh*
Im with Bigpond cable, and the service is slow. Usually crawling at around 3-8Kb/s. I have problems with real audio timing out. I just hope telstra gets their butt into gear and connects to the new one. Chances are they wont cause its owned by Optus, which they dislike intensely. Normally its Optus borrowing Telstras network, now it might be the reverse.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
What am I missing here? The pipe we are discussing has sweet fanny adams to do with the USA. Check out the route.
Some drunk, old and likely insane freighter captain decides to drop anchor 100 miles out to sea and accidentally kicks half the world in the nuts. I guess even the little people still have some power... :D
----------
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
"they're over 100% times more expensive than other bandwidth providers" Does that mean it costs the same as the other providers?
hmmm... i'm tempted to ride over to floreat this afternoon and have look around for that manhole. maybe i'll find an off switch or a large 'please do not not press this button' button.
As far as I know, Telstra is not the largest ISP or even the largest wholesale provider in the country. Optus bandwidth is both larger and cheaper. I'm fairly sure that more ISPs get their bandwidth from Optus. I know mine does. Add to that, Optus now has the largest connection out of the country, the Southern Cross Cable from east coast to US.
"Australia... The land up over, depending on your frame of reference."
> You make Australia sound like some kind of backwater that's up there with the places they have more guns than food.
You mean, like the USofA?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
That would be cool.
> You make Australia sound like some kind of backwater that's up there with the places they have more guns than food.
:)
You mean, like the USofA?
Probably not the whole of it.... I'm sure there's a few pacifists in southern California and Alaska.
Now, if there wasn't some truth to the stereotype he's referring to, then why are you taking offense? Do you cling to the belief that you have a right to carry a gun in case the King of England walks in through your door? Do you think of proponents of gun control as left-wing extremists? Do you long for the day when it'll be legal for you to buy an IMI Uzi at the local gas station?
Probably not. So why let it bother you?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
At one point I thought that the Internet's whole reason for being was to provide(at USA's request) a system that could survive critical problems (eg.in the event of war), by dynamically rerouting etc. If that is so, why do we have these problems? Forgive me if I'm naive Mike
Linux fan and Win32 developer
Wrong! You see, those are not simple cables, not even just a bunch of expensive monomode fibers. Even the best fiber doesn't transmit a signal over several thousand kilometers. You need signal enhancers at regular intervals (like, every 50km or so), and those cost something on the order of a million bucks. So please don't call other people idiots when you have little clue yourself...
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
There's a boat
That's a float
off the coast
that can boast
that's why we wrote
about the hole
in the bottom of the sea...
But it did affect the whole world. Maybe you should follow your own advice?
from article:
-----[
The cable cut had also affected Internet access in Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, UK and the USA, though its biggest impact was in South East Asia.
]-----
----------
Even as you read this, your pants are strangling your loins! Aaa!
Informative?! Dear God, did the idiot moderator even click the link?
--
Obfuscated e-mail addresses won't stop sadistic 12-year-old ACs.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I work for a medium size telco doing backbone work.
I can just imagine what a pain in the ass this will be to fix!
For those who are unfamiliar with SONET fiber technology:
You have to understand that for most companies, (until just recently), SONET is set up in a dual ring configuration. This is somewhat analogous to FDDI in a Lan. There are generally 4 fibers between offices, 2 per cable, (transmit and recieve). If you get backhoe fade on one cable, the signal gets transferred to the other cable's transmit and recieve. To set up a star type topography has traditionally been cost prohibitive, and is not done too often.
Although the internet is highly redundant on the IP level, most of continental and international traffic is jammed onto a few huge capacity strands of fiber to save money.
One cable cut in a long haul situation can quite possibly be disastorous in many areas of the world. I imagine Australia, being an island in the middle of nowhere, (internet wise), can't have too many redundant links.
Just a thought
If you put things on land then you have to worry about far more things that can screw it up. Like, for example, drunk backhoe drivers. Or drunk drivers deciding that that pole would be a good thing to hit.
Also, you would actualy have to buy land, or lease the rights to land, if your going to run a land based cable.
I havent ever looked at the numbers, but I would suspect that per km, its cheeper, in the long run, to run cable underwater.
Heres another article at Telstra.com, from Reuters. Seems it is affecting 33 countries, and will take a few days to fix.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
Ah... you must be new to Slashdot...
That reminds me of a situation here in MN a few years back...
:)
Internet service was cut off for several days after a homeless guy was sleeping under a bridge...I beleive his blankets were covering some exposed electrical power equipment and a fire started. All the fiber lines nearby were melted (this is from memory, the story is probably off a bit). ALL the lines into MN at that time were through this area (maybe they still are?) so there was no net for a few days. If someone from MN remembers the exact story, post a reply
I think the point is that a fair amount of the net is fragile in this manner. Remember, you only have to cut the line once over any distance to prevent it from working. Obvious yeah, but people seem to forget.
Has anoybody checked the possibility of a radioactive dinosaur tripping on the wire on its way to Darwin?
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
The evil backhoe is a common antagonist and joke among ISPs and backbone operators -- people 'in the business' (the internet business, that is).
I worked in a NOC and up into engineering at a minor internet backbone (for those of you up on your history, the first one to use ATM) and whenever something went down, we'd joke "Some drunk ran into a light pole," or "Some stupid backhoe operator took out MAE East again."
It's funny, but it does happen and causes a lot of people to pop Tums until it's over. Train wrecks can be devestating too, since fiber/copper are often run along train tracks for a lot of reasons.
After a brief search, I came up with the following interesting blurbs:
A fiber cut from 1999
One from 1998
An article about a fiber cut on Slashdot itself
Sprint has "fiber repair" rodeos, heh.
If you do a google search on "fiber cut" and "backhoe", you'll come up with tons of hits. So, you can see, backhoes being the bane of the service provider is a very true statement.
FYI, the NANOG mentioned in some of those articles is the "North American Network Operators' Group" and they have meetings where they discuss cool stuff related to the internet. I went to a meeting once.. boring as hell. But I got some t-shirts and the day off work to go. Wheeee!
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't oz have the exact same problem when their entire power grid was routed through one big underground cable? I guess the australian philosophy is why have 2 decent ones when you can have one great one?
America,Asia, Africa and Europe are isolated now.
__
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Here is another link to the story at ZDNet.
Shouldn't we, as an act of kindness to the country of Australia, mirror the site to which we are referred in the article? After all, we don't want Australia /.ed.
And don't Telstra administer AARNET? I seem to remember they took that over when connect.com.au went full-on commercial...
Nope. The AARNET mirror homepage seems to answer that question for you. Also, the AARNET network page has more details
"... slashdot takes care of the remaining 40%. we just link to this aussie page, that should do it."
totally m8... I feel the same way... it's downright dodgy as hell the way they did it...
I must burn in hell, suffer and pay for my sins
But Gods the one who's losing, Satan always wins!
Check out the latest stats on Oz's bandwidth via the Internet Traffic Report at this address
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Ocean conditions and prevailing currents prevent undersea cable from being layed in most areas of the ocean.
You see, while daily tides don't seem too powerful to the average person, the stress imposed on a cable that is exposed to miles upon miles of oceanic currents will break even the strongest of cables. A similar situation was previously discussed here
With respect to these conditions, Floreat Beach in Perth is the ideal area to lay cable. This coastline is sheltered from the impact of high energy swell by a series of submerged calcaranite barriers and offshore islands. As a result, low energy conditions prevail, especially in summer when incident wave heights are generally less than 0.5 m, giving the beaches a lake-like appearance.
In addition, Perth is home to many major Australian dotcoms and ISP's. It is considered by many to be Australia's version of Silicon Valley in the US.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
To expand on what was mentioned earlier about redundacy a bit...
Redundancy in the telecom world takes on two basic forms - equipment redundancy and circuit redundancy.
Equipment redundancy is pretty much what it says - redundant equipment in place with the same end service in mind. Should a processor in a fiber multiplexer die, fry, go up in smoke, whatever, the equipment fails over to the backup processor with little or no interruption of service. This is more or less a minimum standard in the telecom world.
Then there is circuit redundancy, which takes two more basic forms, either over a single cable (with multiple fiber strands), or over multiple cables. Unfortunately, more often than not in more "rural" areas, this is usually multiple fiber redundancy within a single cable. Which covers almost all equipment failures involving the physical cable interface, but does nothing at all for when Joe-Backhoe-Operator digs without a locate and tears up 15 feet of cable without even noticing it. Which is the most common failure I've experienced.
Even multiple cables isn't always the answer, especially if the physical routes aren't diverse enough. I can think of two instances, both in the upper midwest, where multiple cables in proximity (read - one or more conduits in a very small space) were damaged or destroyed, once by fire, and another by a vandal who knew where to find them.
The ideal situation is for telephone companies to have two routes out to the "network" running in almost opposite directions. However, again, although this works well for switched voice calls, most of the time it doesn't work for "nailed up" point to point circuits, which still leaves those types of circuits, commonly used by ISP's where frame relay isn't available, in the cold when routes are destroyed. And, we all know how fragile frame relay can be, especially when Worldcom is at the helm - "Oh, let's just globally upgrade the software in our network without any phasing or large scale testing at all. Oh, yeah, and when it falls on it's nose, let's let it fester for a week or so before we get the network to re-converge."
So, there you have it in a nutshell. Nothing is foolproof, especially if you don't own or control all of the network from point to point. But, I think most everyone would agree, there are very few times I've ever picked up the phone and not had dialtone. I think most people in the states would agree with that. Remember, the telephone network is the most complicated, expensive, diverse, available electronic network in the world. And although the phone companies are far from perfect, especially the former US West and Worldcom, when you think about it, it's really amazing how stable it is, and that it works as well as it does!
Brad
He's right, I'm wrong.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
Oh well, that's easy then! We just stick a bunch of those tidal power plants on an otherwise perfectly good section of beach, and they'll suck up the excess tides. Then lay the cable as you please!
--
Dyolf Knip
The problem isn't capitalism, it's quite the opposite: an ex-monopoly being inappropriately propped up by government ownership. This is an artifact of the lack of competition Telstra used to have, and the way it can still throw its huge bulk around in the .au market.
It's good to know that I'm not crazy -- I had the same problem! I kept thinking, "They've really squeezed that ocean together..."
I bet the cable-cut incident as occuring sometime around 19:14 PM Pacific time on Sunday, Nov 19.
Why do I say that? Because I run a web service that criss-crosses between California and Australia (and Tasmania, for what it's worth). We have an n-Tier web application that is hosted, in tiers, both in AU and in CA. The customer's sites are hosted in AU but link to web app pages in CA. Then the web server connects via secured named pipe to a legacy application server back in AU. (Yes, the transaction pings and pongs from the US to AU multiple times before completion). This is usually extremely transparent to the user (you can bet were not running Flash animation over these links!). But beginning Sunday at 19:14 PM my time, the usual became excruciatingly unusual. That's when I began logging timeout errors.
I don't know whether to be shocked at what effect one cut cable has caused, or to marvel that even with a severe blow to a continental backbone the Internet is routing around the damage, as designed.
One thing for sure -- I'm glad I'm not running a leased-line application that requires me or my company to troubleshoot the network! How nice to completely off-load responibility for intercontinental networking to completely unrelated third parties. There's antother point to be made about the distribution of labor in this story...and the economies of scale... but I digress...
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
The pot calling the kettle black?
Actually cable is not cheaper then laying it. Assuming they are using single mode fibre as opposed to multimode step index or multimode grade index fibre they are probably paying something like $74AUD per meter.
Here in the Pacific Northwest, a construction contractor can sever a single fiber cable between Vancouver, WA and Longview, WA, and a significant portion of the region is without long-distance telephone service or internet for an entire day.
By long distance, I mean even neighboring towns a hundred miles away from the break can't even call each other. Apparently, in order to complete a call, billing and routing information must go over that specific cable.
I think when it happened back in June, the "buried cable locating service" had to pay for the repair, since the cable was not where they said it was. Still, I don't blame them for the outage; I blame the phone company for not having geographically separated redundancy.
Seems the telephone companies' idea of redundancy is two pairs IN THE SAME CABLE! The idiots!
Feel free to complain about Qwerst (formerly USWerst), Sprint, etc.
At least in Oz, they still have 40%.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Oh, like, that was sooooo off-topic!
moderator == wanker!
Do it again, I don't give a fuck!
(I'm not bitter or anything)
---------------------
%46%55%43%4B !
Did this cause the fact a server located 100km from me wouldn't DNS resolve?
[~] traceroute www.gamedude.com.au
traceroute: unknown host www.gamedude.com.au
It's working now, though.
--
--
no sig for you. come back one year.
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2656 341,00.html
"Traffic redirected: Gray said Telstra had already taken steps to
redirect most of its international traffic through other networks, and
was running at 75 percent its normal load capacity."
More people on Optus network = slower Optus network
The following is a graph of the response time of OZEmails front door measured from ~30 different places around the world. OZEmail's Response Time Thought people may be interested
Because Democrats are tired of being called socialists/communists/etc., because of "union blue", because Reagan had red hair ...
----
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
As far as I remember MCI was there last year or in 1998 (not sure) when I recall reading about ppl in the NOCs wearing T-shirts with a banned picture of a digger ... I think they got their fibers cut 3 or 4 times in the same summer.
That was fun! (NOT!) So there - nothing is new under the sun.
--
Completely correct... Most Australian ISP's rely on the SME cable as the alternate Southern Cross Cable was only activated last week Telstra's largest competitor Cable & Wirless Optus was just as affected as all of their residential and small business users, beit narrow or broadband, were having exaclty the same connectivity problems... Has southern cross access been used as an alternate route, perhaps it wouldnt have reached such havoc, but alas.... for a few hours people just began to realize how much they relied on their net access and stopped complaining about Optus @Home Agreed User Policy, Telstra Bispond Advances speed cap and all net users were finally one in begging for service to be restores. Ahhh, the joy of unity...
I've laughed my arse off when I heard it.
Isn't this so very typical Australian? Wanting to play with the big boys, being part of the party and trying desperately to show that Oz is not a backwater place - and then messing it up badly - each time?
Reminds me of the Australians pioneering censorship... It's been law for quite a while now and there are still load of Australia based p0rn sites. One of our hosting clients that is in that field gets' most of his traffic [and paying users] from Australia. Nobody really talks about the subject anymore.
Of course Southeast asians are gloating, because now proud and oh-so-advanced-Australia is routing most of it's traffic through Singapore again.
I love it. As long as they don't grow up to realize that could be a valued partner if they weren't so imposing all the time, they will at least be a continuous source of entertainment.
Australia=australian=aussie=ozzie=oz
I just had this image of Mr T reading ACAR (Australian Commodore and Amiga Review, of which I was the illustrious Assistant Editor, as if anyone cares).
Actually, he'd only rate as about my fourth most alarming fan. Without the jewellery, he wouldn't even make the top ten :-).
I've never seen a guard at Floreat Beach guarding a man hole. But that said I've never seen anyone guarding any of Perth's telco infrastructure apart from telco facilities or exchanges.
Even something like 4pm EST is near-useless; much better (and geekier) to use 4pm (GMT -5:00).
Actually, about four years ago, I worked for SWBell. One of our projects was to lay several T3 lines bewteen California and Hawaii.
"The transatlantic route is the most populated with cables and has also seen the greatest drop in the price of capacity. Last year, $250,000 would buy a T-1line between London and the USA. Five years ago, that is what it cost to lease a line for a year. Prices have not fallen as far in the Pacific, but will continue to drop worldwide"
Found here
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
You may want to check out SAT-3/WASC/SAFE, which is actually two cables: one goes from Europe, down the West Coast of Africa to South Africa; the second goes up from South Africa past Mauritius to Malaysia. [NB: Don't confuse this cable with Africa One, which was referenced in this Slashdot story a while back.]
Telkom and the international companies behind SAT-3/WASC/SAFE are pushing them as a fully wet (and therefore, presumably safe) backup route for FLAG (WIRED article). Now FLAG is pretty old (and only ~5 Gbps, last time I checked), but there are a few other cables traversing the same route (eg SEA-ME-WE 3 (or is it 5?),) which is right through the currently-unstable Middle East. Some people like to be assured of the stability of any links they may buy - backup [wet] links are one of the answers.
And hey, it's great for [South] African [Internet] bandwidth! :)
Just thought you'd like some background
-Al
I wonder what the bandwidth of that pipe is....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
That's crazy enough to work. Might take alot of those waveplants, but then.. you get lots of power for your POPs! :D
it wasn't the porn filters kickin in?
Such is the infinite Grace of Popeye.
Things are now a lot better, I think we are at like 40% power or so..
How about c|net's story off of the ap: Qwest ordered to pay AT&T $350M for repeatedly cutting a fiber-optic phone line.
[
Here is the link to the story about the sharkes
Check out her page here
Debian - the distro for the sensible Linux user. Now available in 3 delicious varieties!
>What if he stapled "change of major" forms to your papers?
...that way he could always pawn it off on the TA.
Sure... why not. Although a nice suggestion note, like, "I feel you might be better suited to taking auto repair" would be a nicer idea.
Re:well, redundancy is *expensive* (Score:-1)
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 21, @08:50AM EST (#230)
>>You are an idiot
>
>If a professor said that to me, I'd have his ass in the Dean's office pronto
What if he stapled "change of major" forms to your papers?
>It is best to be subtle when dealing with zealots.
That's the way the law makes ya. Gotta CYA 24/7.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
building one link is expensive enough, but 2 when not needed is just not likely to happen, unless they need the bandwidth to sell it. because .au is probably a hard market to get into (upfront costs ++), its rather monopolistic.
therefore, as the only company around, they don't really need to be uber reliable, only decent. from their point of view, redundancy is probably only a cost which they can slash... capitalism strikes again
SSL Certificate
the available bandwidth will decrease even more as sites in Australia are Slashdotted by everyone checking this out.
Damn, those snoop agencies must have send their trainees out to tap the cables again :).
;).
They need more experienced hands at those "special utility" submarines
Cheerio,
Link.
The damaged cable does not usually handle "Most of the entire continent's bandwidth...." It handle 60% of a particular company's bandwidth, which is very different.
And this event does illustrate the need for more connections. The story also explains that there are more connections, including a new cable with 5x the bandwidth of the one damaged. Unfortunately, that new cable is owned by a different company which is not experience technical difficulties.
My mom is not a Karma whore!
...is her e.
Anyone remember this old article in Wired? Talked about FLAG, one of the competitors of sea-me-we. Interesting because it's not owned by the telco monopolies. Talks at length about the difficulties of actually laying the cables (particularly overland, e.g. Suez), and the political issues involved. Sure, the commercial politics have changed since then, but many parts of the article strike me as oddly prescient.
Backhoes can be a problem, but we shouldn't always place the blame on the operator. While it is true that some heavy equipment operators are either drunk or on-something-else, many are excellent operators who take time and care with their work.
My GF's brother-in-law owns and operates a backhoe, and I rode "shotgun" with him on it many times (one of these days I hope he can show me how to operate the thing). I can tell you that when digging, even knowing there is a pipe, cable, conduit, something - it it hard to tell the difference between it and everything else that is "down there". Unless you are operating in "virgin" soil, many times there will be plant roots, old runs, rebar, branches - you name it, and many times it looks just like what you are trying to avoid. A good operator will either have a spotter, or be looking carefully, and stop immediately after seeing something that even looks like a cable or pipe, get off the rig, and inspect the area. More often than not, it is nothing - but every once in a while it is something, then you have to back off, and hand dig around it.
The biggest problem is when you are digging, and you don't spot the hazard - a boom on a backhoe can be moved quickly, or delicately - but even at it's most delicate, there is still a bit of inertia (hey, it's a big mass of steel, for cryin' out loud!) - which can still cause a break, if you don't catch it in time.
I know there are dangerous operators out there - but the majority are good workers, doing a job you or I might not ever think about doing...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
They are losing all kinds of bandwidth, so here is a link to an Australian site. Let's suck that bandwith dry.
--
One seaworthy vessel; ten million dollars
A solid steel anchor; two thousand dollars
Whoring for karma with bad Mastercard ripoffs; priceless
There are some things having a life can't get you. 87 Karma is one of them.
Routing through the mideast is a little dicey given the political instability.
Watch out for connecting through the USA right now. Things are bit unstable out there at the moment. The favourite of the current president is trying to get in while the son of a previous president (the other power faction in the country) is trying to get in supported by big industrial money. It's all snarled up over some sort of dodgy procedure over counting votes and whose votes are elegible. I think there's also some sort of worry about the political neutrality of the legal people sorting out the mess. So it's all a bit politically shaky with concerns about corruption there, no actual leader of the country ready for the next term of election. But people assure me that in the long term we don't have to worry. ;-)
http://www.whirlpool.net.au/
where people vent their spleen over both Telstra and Optus, the only providers of cable net access in Australia (and only to the select few at that).
.
In Oz, as a Telstra customer last night, data rates to the US were down to a few hundred bytes per second (assuming you could successfully connect at all), and ping times were up to ~5000 msec. Thankfully, I didn't have any big up/downloads that needed doing. Things have improved today - ping times are back to normal and bandwidth is up to ~5-6 kilobytes per second (I'm on a cable modem).
How is it for others in the region? All we've heard so far is Australian reports, but this outage will unfortunately be affecting people throughout Asia :(
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
This is entirely offtopic, but for anyone interested, check out www.loser.com. I submitted this as a story, but it looks like it might be a while before it gets read. This is worth checking out now.
Russian Russian Russian RussianDollSig DollSig DollSig DollSig
Actually, rumor amongst the underground is that someone (possibly a non-australian government agency) fucked up a Carnivore-esque program running on the cable so that it doesn't pass IP packets anymore.
Purely rumor, but still interesting.
- Most of the entire continent's bandwidth, you see, courses through a particular manhole
... sheesh
Read the article, and you'll see:- Other ISPs and networks such as Optus were uncongested.
Yes, Timothy, we do have more than one ISP out here. And I believe Telstra carries a minority of traffic (given they're over 100% times more expensive than other bandwidth providers). Anyone that has someone like Optus or uuNet (my ISP has redundant links to both) as their upstream would not have been any more affected by this than your typical American (some Aussie sites may have been down).I though my ISP was merely going through a bad patch, but when it takes one hour to learn that the Pentium 4 was designed with Quake3 in mind, then you know something's wrong.
There was physical bandwidth loss, it is all just porno being streamed along the big pipe that they have
my condolences to all Australian Diablo2 hardcore players.
John Carmack fan, browsing at +5 since 1999.
Can't you realize what's happening?! Look at the moon tonight! LOOK AT IT! Can't you see that the light reflected off its dark side is an indicator that an asteroid has hit Australia, and is emitting a fireball brighter than the sun? THIS COULD MEAN THE END oh wait that's a streetlamp outside, never mind.
I heard this on the radio while I was on the way into work this morning and promptly forgot about it until someone sent me a reminder email about an hour ago. I haven't noticed any appreciable slow-down at all. Gamespy is still as dog-slow as ever. Everything else is snappy. Even the Chechen Mujahadeen site (which was in Japan last time I looked) came up OK. I account for probably 20% of traffic for my BU on an average day, so I reckon this may be largely a media beatup. Mind you, we're not Big Pond customers. Telstra is, AFAIK, our backbone. If I could convince the boss to re-enable outbound ICMP I'd do a tracert and see what's up. Anyone having this problem firsthand? Post here if you can't get to http://slashdot.org :)
For the record telstra does have redundancy but my understanding the other pathways couldn't handle the increase in traffic. http://telstra.com.au/bigpond/direct/aboutnet.htm
A large Porn slick was reported to have been spotted off the coast of Singapore today according to Melbourne Radio 3RRR. The Porn slick, leaking from the severed SEA-ME-WE 3 communications cable, was several kilometres long and is spreading rapidly. Shipping is warned to avoid the slick as several ships have already gone down in the area.
;-)
[This space is NotForRent]
I thought I was having a flashback to when pr0n arraived at 2400 baud...
--
Only a week ago a competing company fired up a new link.. Now suddenly their only competition has their wire cut. Hmm. Sounds like a good way to acquire customers for that new expensive link, -- while permanently destroying your competition.
Sounds like what they were talking about in Cryptonomicon, cable cutting wars. Easy to start, but nobody dares start them.
Market mechanisms thrive in a open, transparent environment. Without them you get nepotism and dodginess - eg, Victorian gas .. with them you get at least a semblance of an invisible hand ...
If this fiber links Australia to two other continents, then why isn't it fully looped? I mean, you run one cable from australia to continent a, then another cable to continent b. Hopefully, you are smart enough to run a cable from continent a to continent b, and you have a loop. Say you have OC192 running in this loop, then you have sub 50ms switching capacity and you can switch all traffic from the broken loop to a working loop.
People cut stuff, they drive dump trucks through aerial fiber (hitting power lines as well), and other really stupid stuff. If you have an entire continent running on one link, then that link better be redundant and fully looped. These people have one to blame but themselves (people being the inet company).
Joseph W. Breu
Excuse me? Sometimes sharks bite it?! Don't you think something's wrong if any shark can just swim up and have a few miles of a major Internet backbone for lunch?
I am really hoping that I'm missing something here. As I read the story, all I could imagine was this super-thin strand of fiber-optic cable just lying on the sea floor. Someone please tell me that this is not so. I know they have it "armored", but if a shark can bite through it, then there's nothing really stopping a scheming human from hooking themselves into this. Imagine - buy a length of Gigabit fiber, and hook yourself right up to it... But seriously, if they just have this thing lying there as I imagined, they're really asking for it.
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Routing through the mideast is a little dicey given the political instability. The infrastructure costs make a fat pipe via siberia a real pain. The point is simply redundancy, as well as opening up the net to other areas of the world. a fat pipe going through that part of the world would help this out tremendously.
Now it seems that this point has been brought home in spades. (shudder)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
it's been absolutely horrible. I don't know why but what seems to be the root nameserver over here (ns0.telstra.net) has also been down. Perhaps it's actually located over in Palo Alto, where quite a few telstra servers *seem* to be. (BTW telstra is the big telco/ISP in Aus.) Don't quote me on any of this though, I'm not privy to any official info.
We had a similar problem earlier on in the year, as a matter of fact, when a farmer cut the fibre between Sydney and Melbourne with a backhoe. Luckily it was a private line and it only shut down the stock exchange(!?!).
You think that's bad? When NASA finally shut off the communications with the Voyager II space probe, we lost one of our major links with the outside world...
Well this has sort of flattened out now, and Australia is doing a lot better, but it's still interesting to note whats probably happened here.
1. Earthquake/plate shift (and it seems like an earthquake/plate shift) has disrupted the cable between Jakarta and Singapore. Because of the way the cable is arranged, this will mean Jakarta and Australia are effectively getting zero bandwidth from Singapore. Earthquake/plate shift is highly suspected due to the recent (not long after the cable break) earthquake in Papua New Guinea. Telstra didn't allow for any real redundancy (by running dual cables seperated by a few hundred feet or more) in their cable run. One cable handles all the traffic, so a single break causes complete data loss. (Southern Cross uses a two cable system to allow redundancy in the case of a cable break).
2. The night of the cable break, a power station in Paddington, a suburb just east of Sydney (NSW) burnt down, dropping 20,000+ homes and businesses into a blackout. Paddington is where Telstra routes most of it's eastern states traffic, and indeed all traffic destined to go through the previously existing pipes from Sydney goes through Paddington. A simple hiccup or loss of power caused by failing generators could have caused havoc. Such a scenario seems very likely given the problems that appeared on Telstra's network that night. Any sub-system that kicked in may have not been able to handle multiple failures dealing with traffic problems (eg: fibre to Singapore being down, which goes via Perth, Western Australia), causing more headaches.
3. Due to floods, much (approximately one-third) of the NSW outback is under water, making any problems with cables running across this area difficult. Cables that might be under 6 feet of dirt are under an additional 12 feet of water making any repair hard. Microwave links running across this area could also suffer, due to power outages, or possibly tower foundations shifting and throwing communications out of whack.
Anyway, things seem a lot better for Aussie internal traffic, and external traffic isn't TOO bad (apparently). Fortunately I'm with Optus Cable (who have their own link to the US) at home, and UEComm (One of the many companies who use Southern Cross) at work. *grin*
OK, I went over to trafficreport.com and really didn't see a majore interruption for Australia. There was a drop down to 12 for about 2 hours, but I doubt that was a major interruption. Maybe they have it figured out by now.
Godzilla.
Watching Cowboy Bebop in my jammies, eating a bowl of Shreddies.
http://smw3.fcr.fr/SMW/SMWB2.htm
Didn't anyone teach these guys in elementary school that water is blue and land is !blue? I spent ten minutes studing this map trying to parse out recognizable shapes before I realized that blue was land. I thought it was an extreme close up of Indonesia, and I kept wondering, "Why is Perth on the East coast of this landmass??"
Silly me.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
>FYI: It's actually a Queen at the moment, has been for the last fifty years or so.
I know... QE2. Acceeded in 1952 at the age of 18, on the death of her father, Edward VI. But she's getting on in years, and I've heard a lot of talk about her stepping down. I've also heard that the main reason she doesn't is that she doesn't want Prince Big-Ears to acceed.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Quote from article:
"Australia's link to SEA-ME-WE 3 runs out from a small manhole in the dunes behind Floreat Beach."
Anyone know if this link is guarded? Like security guard on the beach type thing?