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Ship Anchor Damages African Undersea Cables

Posted by Soulskill on from the have-you-tried-turning-it-off-and-then-on-again dept.

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.'"

4 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. Three others in the area severed 10 days ago? by exploder · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:Three others in the area severed 10 days ago? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Takes me back to Iran 2008 when all of the fiber cables going in to Iran got 'accidentally' severed at once. Huge denials about there being anything more than an unfortunate coincidence, yet not long afterwards when Iran held their elections there was a wave of twitter led demos contesting the result (the result was subsequently found to be correct by that Carter mob) All sorts of co ordinated net led attacks on Iranian government. Afterwards it becomes public that Congress had thrown a coupla hundred mill towards using IT esp social networking to disrupt Iran.
      This time they had the coup first and are destroying the system afterwards. Way back in the early noughties before Africom, a certain Libyan leader took it upon himself to provide most of Africa north of the Equator with a cellular network. Now that the Libyan has been sodomised (literally as well as figuratively check out the uncut snuff vid) and the major telecommunications providers have finally realised that Africa is their last big untapped market, certain steps have to be taken to knock LAP Green, the Libyan company (100% owned by the people of Libya - what are they commies?) out of contention.

  2. Restricted Area? What about liability? by NoKaOi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. They have really good aim... by EmagGeek · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.