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
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 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.
Moorings are also usually strategically placed in a harbor. When the tide turns around, boats will swing around 180 degrees. So each mooring should be clear in a 360 degree circle for a distance which corresponds to the length of the intended boat. An anchor has a much larger circle than a mooring, and when the tide turns, an anchor sometimes lets go or drags depending on the design. People dropping anchor anywhere they like in the harbor could cause a collision when the tide turned. So in many places there are rules that you can't anchor in the harbor anyways. I have seen plenty of cables in harbors for exactly these reasons.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.