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.'"

Comments

Re:Who will benefit?

[palegray.net]

The question is really: Who would benefit from diminishing any country's Internet access during a time of war with that nation? Alternatively, conclusively proving that any nation's primary Internet backbone was destroyed might itself be the spark that ignites a war... who might benefit from that? Things get complicated pretty quickly.

True men of genius

[timmarhy]

Study finds that countries with more international fibre links suffers less when one is cut.

honestly, where do these idiots come from, and why does it get posted on /.

single point of failure

[petes_PoV]

What's interesting to see from all of this is that most of the american east-coast cables terminate in NY (OK, probably not all at exactly the same spot, but with enough concentration to cause concern). We have seen the effect of a couple of accidental cable cuts in widely different places. Imagine what would happen if a ship accidentally dragged it's anchor across a proportion of the cables coming into New York, especially the fat ones. Now imagine if it wasn't an accident and there was more than 1 ship involved....

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.

Re:Who will benefit?

[daveschroeder]

If someone wants to tap a communication line, there are a hell of a lot of easier ways to doing it -- above water, no less -- than by having a single ship drop anchor off Egypt in bad weather, destroying precisely the two needed cables, drawing the attention of the entire world via both technical and mainstream press, and then sending a flotilla of repair vessels which are really part of a secret mission to tap the cables, while numerous non-US personnel involved in the cable raising, repair, and testing process all maintain complete secrecy.

Wow, the conspiracy loons are really out for this one. Your "9/11 Truth" action meetings are starting to miss you, guys.