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Why the Mediterranean Is the Net's Achilles' Heel
An anonymous reader writes "A spate of broken cables has brought disruption for many of the world's Web users in 2008 — and the Med has been at the center of the problems. For political reasons, the Mediterranean Sea is an Internet bottleneck through which the majority of traffic between Europe and Asia is squeezed. That traffic must run the gauntlet of earthquakes and heavy maritime traffic to reach its destination. Better and stronger cables are urgently needed to avoid a re-occurrence of the 2008 outages."
Arrrrgggghhhh! From Bartleby.com:
A gauntlet is "a heavy glove, often armored" or "a glove with a heavy cuff covering part of the arm." To throw down the gauntlet is to challenge someone; to pick up the gauntlet is to accept someone's challenge.
A gantlet is "a lane between two lines of people armed with staves or whips, through which someone being punished is forced to run while being clubbed or whipped by the people on either side" (run the gantlet) and, figuratively, "any series of trials and difficulties."
Grumble grumble ...
If India was cut off, that would be a major problem for all the companies that have outsourced call centre and tech jobs to them, and for their customers.
Don't they teach you kids Greek Mythology anymore?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Though there is abviously no excuse for the cables that have been there for a while with newer cables you often find that they have been layed straight through what was once an anchorage as they get closer to shore and nobody has "gotten around" to updating any of the charts yet. I had this situation in the Azores a while back when we anchored in what was shown in all charts and publications to be the only anchorage available only to be met on the dock by a not so friendly police man shouting something in Portuguese along the lines of we just laid a load of fiber optic cables through there and your anchor is on top of them... of course we moved immediately into the port which was what we planed to do in the afternoon but when we asked the Harbour Master why there had been no notice to mariners about the new cabled a shrug of the shoulders was the most informative answer we could get.