Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.