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

Who will benefit?

[G3ckoG33k]

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?

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.

Re:Who will benefit?

[HumanEmulator]

Or does someone benefit because they now have the ability to poke through all the traffic that is now being rerouted through their borders?

Re:Who will benefit?

[pubjames]

well, if you wanted to put a tap on a communication line I should think an outage would be very useful for you - it would give you time to install the tap with no one noticing. Otherwise installing a tap would be an extremely slow process, and one which potentially could be detected.

Re:Who will benefit?

[CaptainPatent]

The question I have not seen posed yet. Who will benefit? Who will benefit of this outage? It's apparent from the article that statisticians and colored-chart advocates have benefited from this outage... if that helps.

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.

Re:Who will benefit?

[iminplaya]

Who could it be, I just don't know. Could it be... Satan??

Re:Who will benefit?

[Oktober Sunset]

I think we already established in a previous story on this that the US has a submarine with modifications especially for for cable tapping. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter

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 /.

Re:True men of genius

[RealGrouchy]

if a country like Pakistan (and i live in Karachi, Pakistan) can work almost unaffected (we did had an outage for 3-6 ours in some parts including our part of the city) how can India, which has the biggest outsourcing and call center businesses running can't do the same... FTAS, it seems fairly clear that Pakistan has had a major outage before. So it would seem natural to conclude that Pakistan learned from Pakistan's outage, but India didn't.

Now, India can perhaps add more lines, or it might decide that additional redundancy is not worth the expense, or isn't a priority.

- RG>

Observations from Dubai

[Paktu]

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?

Re:Observations from Dubai

[Anonymous Coward]

In Dubai at the moment. I'm using the Etisalat ADSL connection. I believe the Internet City region is routed differently. As I recall, internet usage there was unaffected the last time we had a damaged cable.

Slashdot speeds seem to be the same as ever for me. On the other hand, my WoW latency went from 500ms to...well...to some very strange behavior. When I log in, it's at 300ms...and slowly over 5 minutes, it builds up to something like 5000ms, and then disconnects me.

Filesharing over Gnutella2 is down to 4-5 kbps per file max ( as opposed to earlier speeds of 50-60 kbps ). Multiple file downloading brings everything down to 0-1 kbps.

Haven't tried BitTorrent.

Holy crap!

[rindeee]

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.

SEAMEWE?

[theskipper]

What a coincidence, last night I met a girl in an AOL chatroom with the exact same name.

The Effects of the Fibre Outage

[Peet42]

...has led to blockages in http://www.google.com/tisp/ that seem immune to data-flushing.

Re:taps

[yidele]

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....

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:single point of failure

[anticypher]

Your ignorance stems from lack of knowledge, because you aren't looking at real maps, just some graphics made by someone with absolutely no knowledge of the topic who had to make something, by deadline. The telegeography maps are the worst, it's as if they've gone to great lengths to get it as wrong as possible.

There are at least 60 separate landing spots on the east coast of north america, from Miami up into Newfoundland. All those cables that look like they go to NY actually land at various spots on long island and in NJ, but then get hauled overland into the data centers in the NY area.

There is as much redundancy and diversity as could be engineered in, given the budget constraints that the fibre system has to some day earn a profit. Undersea topography plays a big part as well, certain parts of the ocean just can't be used to safely lay fibre upon. There is also a need to avoid busy ports and shipping lanes. All taken into consideration when financing a US$1Billion cable.

I already posted in a previous thread about the Suez Canal, where many /.ers thought the fibres went along the bottom of the canal, because that is what some low-res graphics seemed to show. The reality is all the fibres that hit Egypt do so away from Suez, travel overland, then hit the Red Sea at various diverse points. It is much easier and cheaper to put in overland fibre systems, and certainly easier to maintain by sending a truck full of engineers out rather than wait for a repair ship to be scheduled. Undersea fibres are also much cheaper for shorter hauls with more landings, because of all the power requirements for repeaters.

the AC

Re:single point of failure

[anticypher]

Yeah, those last two sentences don't stand on their own. They are two separate things, each needs more explanation.

Over land, rights of way can be quite expensive. Under sea, once away from a coastline, a fibre doesn't require any property rights payments.

Over land, fibre runs are not very well protected in some areas, often attracting the evil backhoe or other dangerous mechanica. What makes fibre on land cheap is the ability to put in easily to maintain repeaters and dispersion compensators, and electricity can be obtained locally. Repairs are also relatively cheap and rapid.

Under water and once away from the immediate coastline, there isn't much dangerous to fibres except boat anchors, and the occasional earthquake caused rockfall. Fibre runs, still need active electronics every 80 to 300 Kms to boost the signal, shape it, or compensate for dispersion. To power electronics far away out to sea, the only place to put electricity is at the landing point. The longest Pacific Ocean fibres require something like 25,000 volts at 10 amps from each end to power the most distant repeaters. That means the first sections of a fibre support cladding need to carry huge currents and have large dielectrics to prevent arc-overs.

If you can build additional landing points to provide electricity, you can build cheaper fibres. With the most recent advances in optic fibre quality, a run up to 200 Kms doesn't even need repeaters, some manufacturers are claiming 320 Kms without a repeater with the most modern optics powering the signal. That makes short run underwater fibres about the same cost with less risks of cuts.

the AC

Re:Ameircans much?

[Eli Gottlieb]

We all know, but some jackass decided that "Mediterranean" should serve as a convenient, politically correct euphemism for "Middle Eastern".

They really just wanted to sell hummus without people realizing that's what Arabs eat.