Slashdot Mirror
Third Undersea Cable Cut
Many readers are reporting that another undersea fiber optic cable has been cut, apparently caused by another wayward anchor. It looks like Iran has completely lost Internet connectivity."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Iran hasn't lost connectivity, the specific router that Internet Traffic Report is checking has lost connectivity.
Even the University that hosts the router that ITR is checking is still up: http://www.iust.ac.ir/
Username taken, please choose another one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine_communications_cable
Includes a nice picture, and description of each layer.
Here's the picture link directly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Submarine_cable_cross-section_3D_plain.svg
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The BBC has an article with a cross section of an undersea cable
The first cable - the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) - was cut at 0800 on 30 January, the firm said.
INSIDE A SUBMARINE CABLE
cable infographic
1 Polyethylene cover
2,4 Stranded steel armour wires
3,5 Tar-soaked nylon yarn
6 Polycarbonate insulator
7 Copper sheath
8 Protective core
9 Optical fibres
Not to scale
A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.
FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.
SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.
It's amazing that a ship's anchor could have the strength to pull apart two layers of stranded steel armour wires, a layer of copper, kevlar layers, and three polyethylene layers.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
All my co-workers phones aren't ringing off the hook with callers trying to subscribe them to worthless trade publications today (very likely a coincidence, but it sounds good anyway). So, now we know how to really stop all those nagging calls from people with really poor english on a noisy connection. Then again, so goes many of the tech support and customer service lines, too.
5? close guess! The actual number is 18 million.
Yeah I know you're a troll but I don't care.
please quit pulling numbers out of your ass.. The waters are overall very shallow and have a maximum depth of 90 metres and an average depth of 50 metres. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Persian_Gulf#Geography
I hope that people who have seen Star Wars think it's funny. I'm sorry if I offended you.
I don't support my country's Middle East policy, for the record.
-Dave
""A communications disruption can mean only one thing - invasion."
Who the hell thinks this comment is funny? "
Lighten up Francis. It's a quote from Star Wars, Episode 1.
"But this one goes to 11!"
The USS Jimmy Carter (SSN-23, the newest (and heavily modified version) of the Seawolf class submarines) was NOT retrofitted... it was specifically designed and built to be a replacement for the USS Parche. The keel of the Carter was laid in 1998, and the submarine was commissioned in early 2005.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today
I wish that man would go away.
Hugh Means (1875 - 1965)
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Maybe they all got cut because they all run in parallel? An anchor dragging along a canal, breaks one immediately, and opens up the other two, exposing the bare fibers. The current or wake from passing ships break more and more fibers, leading to more outages. I've seen pix of the suez canal, and it doesen't seem all that wide, compared to the ships that pass through it.
There's one other possibility: the companies who own the networks are leasing glass from each other and there's really only one cable. For example, Level3 (lvlt) builds a network. Since it expensive to build out, they trade glass with whoever may have dark fiber available (often times telcos). It shows up on the books as theirs, but really it maintained by a telco. Happens all the time in the US.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
You can't prove the positive either. You can only infer one hypothesis or the other based on testing each, arriving at a refined hypothesis through the process of elimination. In science, we call that "science".
One must formulate a hypothesis before anyone can test it. If I postulate, I have no responsibility to show evidence of such postulation--other people can do that. If they are wise, they will consider this possibility here, or risk more cables getting cut through mechanisms they have chosen to ignore.
Let us consider the facts here. For as many years as I know of, no cable has been cut. Lets think about the probabilities. We'll assume one cable is cut per 1500 days (< 5 yrs) on accident. So, on any given day, the probability is 1/1500 assuming its just another day at the beach (so to speak). Now, I have read about 3 cables being cut in as many days. We can use binomial probability to determine our expectation for 3 cables being cut in just your ordinary average year: 0.0018. How about an ordinary average week? 1.034e-8. Ok, the latter was a pretty improbable event, wouldn't you agree? How about your ordinary average stretch of 3 days?
So you are going to tell me that its even less likely that the cables were cut by one nation or organization acting maliciously to achieve some end?
[Tinny voice sounding like you]You know what, actually I think the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 911 were not colluding with each other--but I am exempt from proving this because "you can't prove the negative".[/Tinny voice] Do you see how idiotic you sound?
We knew to look for colluding terrorists after 911 because three improbable events (planes running into buildings) happened closely in time. Do you see the similarities, or are you going to assert that its just a coincidence?
Just callin' it like I see it.