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Ship Anchor Damages African Undersea Cables
New submitter Bastian227 writes "A ship anchoring in a restricted area disrupted an East African high-speed Internet connection. The damaged fiber optic cable is one of three new undersea cables in the area off Kenyan coast. Repairs could take up to 14 days. 'The Teams cable had been rerouting data from three other cables severed 10 days ago in the Red Sea between Djibouti and the Middle East. Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second and form the backbone of East Africa's telecom infrastructure. Telecom companies were reeling over the weekend as engineers attempted to reroute data south along the East African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope.'"
no more Nigerian scams!
Considering Kenya/Tanzania/Uganda being more Western friendly and advanced over their neighbors it makes them hot spots for radical islamic groups. I'm sure all the new updated monitoring hardware on the other servered cables will be matched here as well.
Looks like war!
Another bunch of accidental cable disruptions clustered in space and time? Am I paranoid to wonder if something's going on here? Or is it like how earthquakes get more press when they come in bunches?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
The fools! If only they'd built the cable with 4001 hulls! When will they LEARN?
I wonder what batshit conspiracy the internet will decide is behind it this time.
Together, the four fiber-optic cables channel thousands of gigabytes of information per second
They're called petabytes.
So the internet is now leaking cats into the red sea?
My first program:
Hell Segmentation fault
Now all those bits and bytes are now flowing into the sea
How can they make their ransom demands known without the modern benefit of high speed digital traffic on fibre?
Perhaps they could mail them the old fashioned way.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Glad to see Slashdot is consistant.
The Nigerian Scam spam seems to have fallen off a bit. I guess I'll just have to wait a little longer for those funds to arrive.
So, like terabytes then, right?
Amazingly, the event was predicted in explicit detail more than ten years ago by They Might Be Giants.
My Man: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4H7cYve6-Q
What exactly does "restricted area" mean in this case? If this means ships are prohibited from dropping anchor there and the ship did anyway, what is the consequence to the captain and ship owner? Loss of license for the captain for violating restricted area? Jail time for vandalism? Ship's owner on the hook for the cost of repair? Seems like if this sort of thing is becoming common than some severe punishment might encourage others to be more careful in the future...especially if it means loss of career and/or freedom for the captain and significant loss of money to the owner.
Cape of %4^af#53fe$^[[CARRIER LOST]]
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Funny I was looking at this article on another aggregator (why is /. always so behind?) and so went digging and found these:
Here's one (skip ahead to 1:40) and this is the other one.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I wish they would think of a more original excuse.
Pirate ships are waiting just outside of radar range for the fiber repair vessels to come and fix the cables they broke.
is it just me - when I hear about these so called "severing" of internet lines - I cant help but think that some spy/hacker network has hust hooked into the net to do man in middle interception.....
You know that game where you drop a quarter into a fish tank and try to get it to fall into a shot glass to win a prize?
Somehow they keep dropping anchors through 5000 feet of water to hit a cable a few inches in diameter laying on the ocean floor.
"And nothing of value was lost"
Insurance covers it all, then consumers pay for it in higher costs for goods due to higher operating costs. Restricted means it is marked as no anchorage on charts. It is unlikely it appeared on all charts since the cables were fairly new. My guess is that ships anchored in the area for years then the cables were placed which led to the accidents.
We know you and your CIA splice team are on the job.
When I was in the Navy, on Oahu, a friend of mine was a research assistant and professor at University of Hawai'i on Oahu. They were doing research on the Hawaiian Monk Seal, and had to attach fake rocks with electronic gear to the reef.
They were working in 300 feet of water, which is extremely deep for SCUBA, and highly dangerous even with mixed gasses. Bottom time is around 15 minutes, and deco times are in hours. Because of this, they needed to be near a decompression chamber in case of an emergency, but the closest one at the time was on Maui.
However, the Navy Seals out of Pearl have a portable deco chamber, so UH approached the Navy about teaming the Seals with the UH dive team. It was a match made in technical heaven: the Seals got dive time, which is always at a premium, and the UH team got expert dive buddies and a portable deco chamber on their ship, the Moana Wave.
They were out like this for over a week, and everyone got pretty friendly. Things were working perfectly, no issues, on schedule, everyone happy. On one of the dives, they got to the bottom just outside of the entrance to Pearl Harbor, and were making their way to the work site. There in the sandy bottom, was a set of tracks.
Just like you would see laid down by a bulldozer or tank.
They were about 5' apart and around 6" wide, and went from deep to shallow, following the slope. They didn't have time to ponder it for long, since they only had less than 15 minutes to do the work. They kept going and came across another set of tracks, this set even wider, and the tracks likewise even wider. Again, no time to gawk, so they went on.
After a long deco stop near the surface, everyone was dead tired. Each diver needs the help of two people just to take off the tanks (they were wearing 6 tanks), so everyone is sitting on the benches, just chatting. One of the UH divers mentions the tank tracks on the bottom, and how neat they were.
One of the Seals chimes in, "Yeah, that's a new one! I didn't think we had one tha-" And suddenly remembers where he is, and who he's talking with, and clams up.
That was 1998. Technology has only advanced since then.
Hanlon's Razor is only sharp until the next bit of data comes along.
[End Of Line]
I would hope that the ship's captain and owner would get some kind of sanction for such carelessness. Africa's telecom capability is fragile at best, and the fiber ring is a very important part of it. Several countries have been harmed (commercially) by careless anchoring.
S which East African nation are we invading next?
Every time this happens, multiple underwater links get cut in rapid succession.
Not another Italian Captain?
That's the question you should be asking yourself.
Who cares what they're called. How many floppy disks does it take to hold them and under how many Olympic size swimming pools of water are those cables submerged?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
My name is Abu Mkumbu. I am writing to you as the director of the national Kenyan cable and Internet company. I am asking your assistance in the following matter. I was trying to move funds from my great grand fathers estate via electronic transfer, when a ship tore the cable that holds the secure bank line to my swiss bank account. Since I have no more access to my swiss bank account, I need someone trustworthy to assist me in getting these funds (US$14,113.142.78) out of my inflation ridden country. As a Kenyan national, i can not set up a bank account in your country. If you were to help me transfer the money, I will let you keep 10% of the estate as a transfer fee.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
are doomed to repeat splicing. Seriously; how can any 'professional' still be designing undersea cabling having no shallows protection against anchor strikes, regardless the intent? Lowest bidder effect? Immorally lucrative service contract? What?