Slashdot Mirror
The Effects of the Fibre Outage Throughout the Mediterranean
Umar Kalim writes "Analysts have been studying the effects of the fibre outage throughout the Mediterranean in terms of network performance, by examining the changes in packet losses, latencies and throughput. We initially discussed the outage yesterday. 'It is interesting that some countries such as Pakistan were mainly unaffected, despite the impact on neighboring countries such as India. This contrasts dramatically to the situation in June - July 2005, when due to a fibre cut of SEAMEWE3 off Karachi, Pakistan lost all terrestrial Internet connectivity which resulted, in many cases, in a complete 12 day outage of services. This is a tribute to the increased redundancy of international fibre connectivity installed for Pakistan in the last few years.'"
The question I have not seen posed yet. Who will benefit? Who will benefit of this outage? Who would benefit from sealing off Egypt and other countries in the Middle-East? The Chinese? Hardly. The Brazilians? Hardly. The Vietnamese? Doubtfully. The Finns? Doubtful too. Ok, I'm at a loss. Wonder if anyone can come up with brighter guesses?
So they concluded that cut data cables causes a loss of internet service. Good job guys!
I'll tell you what the effect is. It's pissing me off!
honestly, where do these idiots come from, and why does it get posted on /.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Pakistan is not in Mediterranean. Outage is not throughout Mediterranean. that's like basic geography, people!
root of all...
So 5 pages to conclude that under bandwidth constraints packet loss and RTT increase? WoW!!!
So now Pakistan and India are Mediterranean countries? World is changing really fast...
I also think we have to invent a new award for the ugliest plots ever seen.. Jeez!
I'm posting this from Dubai- near Media City/Internet City for those who are familiar. Certain sites seem to work pretty well- Fark for some reason loads very quickly. Other sites (including Slashdot) are about as fast as AOL in 1994. Speeds seem to not always correlate to usage levels; around noon it's usually not terrible but late at night browsing is almost impossible. Anyone else care to share their own observations?
The conspiracy theorists are coming out of the woodwork on this one. It's an anchor drag folks. The last thing any 'conspirator' wants is comms to be cut off. Quite the opposite in fact.
What a coincidence, last night I met a girl in an AOL chatroom with the exact same name.
...has led to blockages in http://www.google.com/tisp/ that seem immune to data-flushing.
This isn't an analog line, genius. The traffic of interest is in the client/ tributary payload, so the logical place to put a tap is where the container terminates or where it is switched. that means a telecom data center, not the bottom of the ocean. Additionally you needen't "splice" into live media ( thereby causing noticeable loss of traffic and noticably increased signal attenuation afterwards) - telecom transmission technology allows switching to protection at speeds 50 milisec, which is not noticable to human hearing...anyway, the data of interest would be on an encrypted data, not voice channel. 80GB is a lot of voice traffic, to sort this out in realtime you'd need a pretty stout set of telecomm eqpt. Consider that a single voice channel is 64kbps, also the fact that voice traffic ( if going over tdm and not voip) is multiplexed into sdh most likely carried over dwdm/wdm. A single e1 ( 2 mb/s) carries up to 32 voice channels, there are 70 e1 worth of payload in an stm1 , which is 155 mb/sec. How are you going to monitor this many discrete ( and multiplexed, encoded ) signals at once? do you even realize how much traffic that is? don't forget that sizable portion of voice goes over data ntwks as voip, and you can have ip using bridged ethernet over sdh, ima over multiple e1, mpls, atm or directly on top of sdh ( short list, there are many more possibilties)... anyway, if you want to listen in, you'd better do it somewhere you can actually do something with that data. having said all that, i think this is a good low tech way to test their readiness....
When I was doing work on resilient architectures for companies, we were always telling then to install redundant and diverse cables, so 1 accident wouldn't chop all their connections.
It looks like this lesson has not been fully learned.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Not everyone is suffering from this outage. Looking at the throughput map, we can see that Iran and China have increased (2x) their throughputs. I presume this can be explained by the fact they don't share the surviving lines anymore.
Man o man, geography must be a really hard subject
Am I the only one that finds it funny to find a blurb that mentions the Mediterranean Sea and lists countries like India and Pakistan?
What are the stock market traders saying there? Has this had an impact at all?
I wonder how all those American companies that offshored all their call centres to India are doing... Most of their phones are VoIP. Would be nice to see that all their so-called "tech support" doesn't work until the fibres are repaired. Might make them think twice about such idiocy. As someone that works in a call centre for a smaller ISP here, I always get a chuckle from the (nearly daily) call where someone basically thanks me for being white and in Canada. They're not racist, they just hate poor service, and India's culture is not service oriented in any way at all (ex: In India/Pakistan, showing up 2 or 3 hours late for an appointment is okay [for both apointee and apointed]. I know this from having dealt with dozens of people from either culture and that is their personal experience when they were living there also. Here, if you are more than 15 minutes late you can't expect the other person to have waited any longer for you.) That along with the caste system just seals the deal.
You can't take the sky from me...
Does anyone know what routing protocols these sites would be running?
I'm guessing BGP, but if that is the case, is this indicative of a failure to properly implement it? Or would this be the expected behavior from a well engineered network under these circumstances?
NATO troops in Pakistan and Afganistan need bandwidth for Skype and porn.
I've seen a lot of government conspiracies, but this one is so odvous. We all know our government LOVES to spy, so what would stop the NSA from deciding it's legal to watch everything everyone else is doing?
I still believe the NSA broke the cable when they pulled up in their subs to drill into the cable and watch all the data going through
Was that "ship" that allegedly broke the cable ever named? No? So how does anyone confirm that the ship really did it? It's the government's fault!
But we all know there are no accidents in an intelligent universe.
As for the possibility that it was an effort coordinated by some government intelligence agency or group I would rate it that probability very low.
It could be due to extreme weather which is altering ship behavior in the region.
However this low probability incident occurring in a set of three with such a close proximity in time is against random odds.
I suspect there may be a mysterious force at work, like the one in Infinite Play the Movie, http://infiniteplaythemovie.com/mysterious_force.aspx a sort of all pervading intelligence.
Of course there is a culprit lurking in the background a new characters that has been entering the scene. Extreme Weather which will be increasing as more energy enters the global system producing turbulence.
It could be a sign! That extreme weather has entered the chain of cause and effect and we best are prepared and ready to adapt.
Yes, a mysterious force operating behind the scenes part of some divine plan and the unfolding of our evolution.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
This one should definitely have been from the department-of-redundancy-department!
From what?
The already-confirmed fact that one clumsy ship can cut off internet access for 75 million people with one ill-advised drop of the anchor?
So if you're implying the US is somehow behind this with your cutesy little message feigning ignorance, get a life.
Who's suffering most? Wealthy kids in those regions who can no longer connect to Blizzard and play WoW.
Imagine the chaos that would ensue if South Korea had all of its connections (or a fair amount of them) severed. On the one hand, I'm sure productivity would be hampered by their network speeds slowing down dramatically (if the fair amount), or completely (if all were severed.) On the othe hand, I'm sure there would be a giant spike in non-computer activities as Starcraft servers see their workloads drop to 1% of their averages.
Thanks for the answer! I was just suspicious of three "cuts" in a row during this time of both geopolitical uncertainty and also some rather severe market pressure. There appears to be gathering forces there to detach the various local currencies from a strict dollar peg and go to a bundled basket of currencies.
"The pair of cables -- which lie near each other on the floor of the Mediterranean Sea -- at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb."
From CBC News: "No quick fix for undersea cables serving India"
http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2008/02/01/tech-india.html
Alcatel-Lucent's 140 m cable vessel, Ile de Sein, one of the most powerful cable ships in the industry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1JEuzBkOD8
I live on a small island off Japan & although I have a 100Mbps optic-fiber internet connection, my real world speed is about 25Mbps. It's been consistently so since I signed up almost 1 year ago. However, the past few days have revealed a remarkable upturn, I now get a steady 65Mbps. Coincidence?
* Game Over * High Score: 264,846,927 -- Your Score: 14
1) Who will benefit from this communication disruption?
Any business that sees the businesses in the Middle East and parts of South East Asia as direct competitors will be glad their competitors are having a rough time. Same is true for countries, and even guilds on some WoW servers (on my old server there was a 'Kuwaiti Elites' guild populated by *gasp* Kuwaitis).
2) The Outage is Not Complete
There is not one country that is entirely cut off. Traffic is slow as hell due to modern day loads being pushed onto outdated cables and overlapping routes. The 'outage' is not just Internet either, but also telephone lines.
Want proof the outages aren't total? Okay. A number of Iranian university websites are still up and running and accessible. 'Breaking News' from Sri Lanka appeared on the BBC when terrorists bombed a bus on the day a 3rd cable was reported to be broken. Sorry, communication is slow but existent.
3) No One Would Have Noticed A Tap
I'm sorry, but any moron who things that the outages are caused by a tap are retarded. As stupid as American legislation and administration can be, and how some inexperienced ground pounders fresh out of high school act, the U.S. Military is pretty damn professional. They know their crap. Almost all the 'blunders' you see in the news are from Civilian agencies.
Further more, the Jimmy Carter is DESIGNED specifically to be able to tap these lines covertly. The military doesn't actually commission and use things that are a total failure. If the Jimmy Carter can really tap wires, you bet your ass it can do it well.
On top of that, no one even NOTICED that a submarine cable was damaged until a SECOND one was hit, 3 and a half hours later. That's when traffic flow all the sudden hit a brick wall and was being funneled through a single, outdated, cable.
4) Legal Implications
Finally, for those other conspiracy nuts, the U.S. isn't going to be 'invading another Middle East country after they disrupt the communications' and is unlikely to be 'monitoring the traffic coming over it's network invasively.'
And why not? Because there is no way Congress is able to hold a secret like a declaration of war these days, and they're legally bound to inform the public as soon as is possible. If the President orders it, his ass is in a sling because he can't legally do that. Aside from that, as recent history shows, the U.S. is pretty good at quick invasions. What happens after the initial 'take over' is typically abysmal, but on the assault their very sharp. If the U.S. disrupted these communications lines in order to invade some country, they'd already be bragging that they took it over AND the resistance (which everyone outside the U.S. would probably call freedom fighters if the U.S. was stupid enough to do something like this) would have already gotten the word out BECAUSE THE OUTAGE ISN'T COMPLETE.
Now for the monitoring, that's a maybe. It's unlikely because the networks are owned by Telcos. If the bill proposing immunity for the Telcos passes, then I'd say its almost a certainty. Liberty of American Citizens would be hamstrung by a governmental party that doesn't want to admit it's a little facist, and another one that's almost apathetic. If it fails, then most Telcos would tell the U.S. government to fuck off until they get a warrant, but then there would be a paper trail. Of course, given the communication monitoring capabilities of the U.S. government, it wouldn't be too hard for them to do so anyways.
Anyways the point to all this, this is suspicious crap in these times. But insofar every conspiracy theory is working on circumstantial evidence at the best, and almost all of it is pure hypothesis. On February 12th we'll know what happened to the cables for sure. FLAG and the consortium that owns and operates SEA-ME-WE 4 have no reason to cooperate with any but their respective governments, none of which are actually the US!
So stop spreading hearsay and panic! Do some research even, it only takes an afternoon to verify everything I've said.
The effect of the fibre outage will be mass constipation!
or maybe a bunch of statics ;)