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Transatlantic Cable Fault Disrupts Internet In UK
An anonymous reader submits "Web traffic between the U.S. and Europe has been hit after an undersea cable developed a major fault on Tuesday. Because the TAT-14 cable network is shaped like a ring, it should be able to cope with one such failure -- but unfortunately the consortium that owns it hadn't fixed an earlier problem, just off the U.S. coast. Just shows how systems with build-in redundancy can still go badly wrong...."
Honestly, this reminds me of the first transatlantic cable. They kept getting faults and they couldn't figure out what it was. Turns out the paying-out machine had the cable rubbing against some fine metal shavings which would occasionally get stuck in the casing and ground the cable to the sea-water.
I wonder what happened to this one?
- Sherman
Because the TAT-14 cable network is shaped like a ring
That on a geeky, tech oriented site such as this, we could have a slighty better description.
Have you considered the irony of posting such a comment in a web based discussion forum, considering that the creator of the web is British?
1) put a big spool of cable on a ship.
2) anchor the cable to shore.
3) set sail for the other side of the ocean.
I had no idea it could be so simple and obvious when I heard it either.
Read "The Victorian Internet" by I forget who wrote it. It is about the telegraph and how all the things we thought were new in the 90's had really been around for 100 years or so (chat rooms, compression, data security) and it talks about the first time some nut decided to put a big cable under the ocean to connect continents. It is a really cool book!
There's more than one cable system linking US with Europe, it just happens that several carriers (Above.Net being one) only have capacity through TAT-14.
Other carriers have working circuits on TAT-14 and another link (e.g. Apollo, Tyco, AC-1, Gemini) and may have some degraded service (depending on whether their transatlantic links are less than twice the size of their peak demand). FranceTelecom OpenTransit is an example of one of them.
Interestingly, not many EU ISPs use TAT-14 North route, since it has a propagation delay of around 110ms (which is 40ms or so more than TAT-14 South from the UK and more than most other transatlantic cables)
Most ISPs in Europe that I can see are fine. Certainly the big international transit ISPs (Sprint, L3, C&W, MCI et al) aren't showing any more trouble than normal.
At the risk of being accused of Karma whoring, This page and This wired article from the late 90s are are good summary and a great story about undersea cables, respectively, despite being a little out of date.
Adding in a DNS server didn't do it for me - I tried using the Demon one and couldn't get anywhere (sticking with the default, I could still reach The Register for some reason, but nowhere else). The problem seemed to be that the ntlworld.com addresses were not resolving - mail, news, and web proxy - so maybe OpenNIC had them listed and Demon didn't
As far as I'm aware the problem wasn't just limited to the UK but to the whole of Europe. One of our transit connection to the US using this Fiber, was disrupted. Following message we received from our transit provider:
We are currently experiencing a catastrophic failure on the fiber ring that is
affectively isolating Europe. We are researching the possibility of
alternative connectivity, and will update you as we get more information.
One more problem which was caused by this link outage is that our dns-servers (and those of multiple providers) where hit with a lot of dns lookups for lockdown.zonelabs.com (seems zonelabs firewall, queries that name). As the dns-server for that zone wasn't reachable anymore (no more traffic to the abovenet network in the US) the dns-servers had to do a query for each new lookup which caused a huge load. And effectively killing the customer dns servers, impacting traffic even more.
It's like TDM, but for a fiberoptic line. Tells you within inches of where the break/fault is and can provide details such as what the nature of the problem is (air gap, short, loss of signal, etc).
Look up OTDR (some made by HP) for further info.
I've found the whole notion of undersea cables fascinating ever since I read Neal Stephenson's Mother Earth Motherboard
Reminds me of how we went through all this trouble at [UNNAMED CORPORATION] of making sure to mirror the root disks for all 3000+ servers, but nobody setup alerts or notifications of a disk failure. So even though all the disks were mirrored if one drive failed, nobody knew. So we ended up running most our boxes off one drive until the other drive went out. So sure, mirroring delayed a major problem, but the major problem still existed.
We also had a similar problem with Fiber Storage. For all the servers they had run two seporate fiber runs to each box that needed to use the "SAN". Each server would have two fiber cards installed. This way if one network went out, it would just fall back to the other card. Well, of course, both cables were plugged into the same switch.. Smart. Yes, we did have a fiber switch go out once.
Of course, there is a significant voltage drop across a line that long, so you have to increase the voltage to get a useful voltage out the other side. The other solution is to use AC power, which should be fine when your data is carried on fiber.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you want to know more about this subject, there is an great article by Cyberpunk Writer Neal Stephenson on Wired in wich he describes the laying of a BIG intercontinental Communication-Cable. As a self proclaimed "Hacker-Tourist" he visits a lot of the construction sites all around the world giving colourful descriptions and a lot of well researched background infos about this rather arcane but fascinating subject. A great read. Find it on: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.ht ml