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How One Clumsy Ship Caused A Major Net Outtage
Ant writes "Here is an interesting world map of various Internet connections, showing how it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions."
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Yea, if you read slashdot, you would have seen this news yesterday.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/02/01/1912220.shtml
It's funny see all the wild speculations and accusations that it was deliberate sabotage by the US the other day, when there was no proof whatsoever.
Now that the facts have come out, I'd like to see those slashbots apologize for undermining the US at every turn and being so unpatriotic.
The image linked from the summary does not depict the physical locations of cables, but is a schematic of existing connections between points on the globe. The lines in that image have not much to do with where the cables actually are. A more realistic representation of (a subset of) the world's submarine cable networks would e.g. be this big PDF or, in a more comprehensive view, that one (sold for a mere $350 :-| ).
Two in the Mediterranean, another between Suez and Dubai somewhere, which is not in the Mediterranean at all.
The nation of Iran appears to be entirely disconnected from the Internet by these events: http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Off into the distance you can see the anchoring area. All the cables except the one that goes around the horn of Africa go through this channel. Maybe now it doesn't look so far fetched?
They should follow the example of the telephone company. Find the owners of the ships and send them a bill for the repair costs. That will get their attention.
Actually, ships are governed by maritime law, which is designed to protect and encourage commerce; I'm not sure if they even would be responsible for damage from an anchor to a cable lying on the seafloor. From my limited recollection, vessel owners liability is generally the value of the vessel (not including the cargo).
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
They aren't total outages like you seem to think. There is redundancy. The internet is slower in those areas because some of their links are severed, but it's not out.
The "World cable capacity" plot at the bottom of the map is misleading. Total capacity is 7.1 tbps and used capacity is 2.1 tbps. They visualized the values as circles, so the ratio of areas should be 7.1:2.1. But instead they set the diameters to that ratio. The result is that capacity appears 9% used when it is actually 30% used (and 80% purchased).
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
i will answer that. I am a half ass colombian(colombian pop) . I grew up in the states, but lived and worked in Colombia for a time, and know, or at least knew their infrastructure fairly well. Colombia at one point in time had two internet companies. EPM(emtelsa) which is state run and owned. And Telesat, which is privately owned, Enrique Biaz I think was the CEO, offered me job around 2002 when I was running around there. I just didnt want to move to Cali. I liked Manizales. Anyway Telesat in Colombia is the link that is down, so one provider is down, not the entire country, because most people use the Emtelsa, or whatever the have evolved into. So while telesat link is down(I think they have changed their name) the country is still online for most everyone else.
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
it's not disconnected. Try this : http://www.khamenei.ir/
Nobody was disconnected: besides the submarine cables, there are land cables and satellite connections, and the copper cables of old, which were used by telecoms.
I believe that many/all undersea cables are mapped.
Ships/captains plying international waters must have up-to-date info. If they damage a cable that is on the maps, they are responsible.
See the great WIRED article from Neal Stephanson on the laying of FLAG:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass_pr.html
OK, it's an article from 1996, but it's one of the best WIRED articles (and looong) ever (back before they were owned by Conde Nast)
L. Scrub
Not really. If this is a ships fault - ignoring directions to anchor, marked warning signs (and there are a lot of them), causing an accident - recovery is very much possible and actually happens all the time with minor regional cables being cut by idiots (ish one incident every 6 months).
The fun part is the fact that when you touch the backbone cables suddenly the [direct] damages rises in a few orders of magnitude. And at that point it becomes more economically feasible for insurer to pull up any lawyer around than just to shrug it off.
Why do so many of those transatlantic cables seem to land in New York?
Two Reasons: Geography and Routing
1) Geography: First, the Guardian's map is a little oversimplified. Most of those cables come ashore in Eastern Long Island or along a relatively narrow stretch of New Jersey coastline, about 50 miles south of NYC proper. They're in those places because of submarine geography. The sea floor isn't flat- there are mountains and canyons, etc. Ever tried to run network cable through a crowded office? Pain in the neck, right? Now imagine doing it with six-foot long tweezers and a blindfold...for 3,000 miles. The cable-layers pick the flattest, least cluttered path they can. In the mid-1950s, we started to get good sonar maps of the North Atlantic sea floor. Laying undersea cable is *expensive*, and there was a big burst of it as those maps started to take the guesswork (and a lot of the risk) out of the equation. And once a company found a good route, they tended to keep using it.
Seafloor mapping:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/03fire/background/mapping/mapping.html
Timeline of transatlantic cables, 1951-2000:
http://www.atlantic-cable.com/Cables/CableTimeLine/index1951.htm
2) Routing. A *lot* of information passes through those cables. It's compressed (Hoffman encoding, anyone?), and at each end you have to decompress it and then route it back into the land line system. This is a big, complicated operation (Much more so in the '50s and '60s when so many of the US-Europe cables were laid), and it's cheaper to add capacity by laying more cables between existing terminals than to build new ones.
Overview of cable topography & operations for one big cable operator, Apollo Systems:
http://www.apollo-scs.com/networktopology/
Note that some companies (including Apollo) are starting to build new routes- the economics for doing that are getting better as cable gets cheaper and data traffic grows (shame on all the Americans downloading video files from peers in Sweden).
So yes, the undersea cable system *should* have much more redundancy, but it *won't* until somebody can make money building and selling that redundant capacity. And actually, these events will speed up that process; According to the Guardian, 50% of India's bandwidth is cut off. The people who own the pipes for the 50% that still works are having a *very* profitable week.
They go over your bottom with a fine tooth comb and a magnet, and they Will Find Things. Oh yes, they will.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear