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Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
Even a slice in the continental backbones can be overcome by a creative redundancy plan and it makes me happy to be a network engineer. Now if rural Ohio would invest in some more infrastructure I wouldn't have to go into "Oh Crap" mode when someone neglects to call DigRite and takes out our single fiber stub. Glad to hear that Telecom Egypt has their act together. -Casey
... undersea cables are heavily armored, not to protect from divers but for anchors and sharks. Sharks are also the reason they generally use optical pumping now ... sharks tend to bite the electrically pumped ones.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/02/27/2051209/ship-anchor-damages-african-undersea-cables
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/08/02/01/1912220/third-undersea-cable-cut
Somebody forgot to call Miss Utility! Again!
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
...would say that sacked the poor guys who were sent to check out and repair the damage.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Actually, the 13th century was probably a low point for post-invasian Islamism in Egypt.
Wait... after 10 years of lurking, you posted anon, and that was what you wanted to say so bad that you broke silence?
Never lurk its better to say your piece and get down modded.
I have a question. Why don't they put these cables where ships don't anchor, rather than laying them right straight through the harbour?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
when using dialup on a 486 to a real unix server and the news reader would post for you when you got disconnected with the message ^h^h^h^h NO CARRIER
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
(posting as anon coward because this is the first post i've ever made on slashdot in almost 10 years of lurking)
a;lksdjoiuoihkjbkjbdkjbva dvbadfb, because really, it's not that fucking important, at least not anymore. Slashdot's been overrun with Libertardians.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Yeah. Libertarians, known for their great influence and vast numbers, have overrun /. Yours may have been the stupidest comment I've ever seen on /. And that's saying something.
It is a fairly normal occurrence, and there are companies who have multiple ships for the express purpose of fixing breaks. You usually just don't hear about it unless it is accompanied by some kind of conspiracy theory. In reality, cables get damaged and fixed all the time. It happens often enough that it is usually not news.
I have a question. Why don't they put these cables where ships don't anchor, rather than laying them right straight through the harbour?
They generally don't lay them in areas where ships anchor. Plus in a harbor ships are generally docked or moored at predetermined locations. There is not a lot or stopping wherever you like and dropping an anchor, that interferes with navigation in the harbor. Note the references to distance from shore and greater depths, it sounds like the ship was anchored in open water.
The real problem is that there is a force of nature where backhoes and anchors are attracted to cables. No cable on land or sea is safe.
So I ask myself, "Why would those divers cut a cable that is already cut?" And the theory I come up with is that the owners of the ship whose anchor cut the cable didn't want to get into trouble for it, so they hire some stupid divers to go cut the cable, then call the cops on the divers. Problem solved: the ship owners can now deny everything and blame the saboteurs for cutting the line. Explains everything, including the wildly improbable part where the divers get caught in the act.
I work for a large IT company with a presence in Cairo. We were told net issues were caused by an anchor early this week. The diver story, while more exciting, is likely BS.
Beware: I believe all are created equal, and have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
What I can't understand is how, in this day in age of GPS navigation to almost the nearest inch, computerized navigation, maps, radar, etc, that on a ship like this it is even remotely possible to still drop anchor at or near one of this fiber optic lines and cut it with an anchor. No offense, but it seems a little silly that we can't solve this issue for once and for all in 2013.
Consider the unstable nature of the Middle East and I think you'll agree the serious answer as to why those divers were down there is probably espionage. The US has a long history of deploying taps on critical trunk lines/backbones for monitoring purposes. This was originally deployed against Soviet phone trunks, more recently we've seen the idea extended with the Utah data center and its backbone taps in the US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/