Slashdot Mirror
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.
Somebody forgot to call Miss Utility! Again!
In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they're not.
Never lurk its better to say your piece and get down modded.
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.
They do put them in areas where ships aren't supposed to anchor, and the areas are clearly marked on charts. But some "captains" ignore the warning markers or have no idea of their position and damage the things.
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There are, for reasons of not digging trenches through the Sahara, limited routes between the Indian and the Mediterranean. Vast amounts of ship traffic move along the same routes and every now and then tend to do stupid things. That area is a natural choke point and unfortunately it increases the likelihood of cable cuts.
If you examine cable faults on undersea cables, most tend to occur at these choke points. Seacom for example has not had breaks further south where the landing points are kept well clear, by 50 to 100km, of the harbours in southern Africa.
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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.