Major fiber cut in europe/middle-east

Been dealing with this all night, as we have a few sites out there.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aH.VPx226QVo&refer=europe

" Dec. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Internet and telephone communications between the Middle East and Europe were disrupted after three undersea cables connecting Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged.

The failures cut the flow of “data of various kinds” between Europe and the Middle East, and there’s no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Reliance Globalcom Ltd. in India. France Telecom SA, which plans to send a maintenance boat to fix the problem, said the situation should be back to normal by Dec. 31.

Three cable systems carrying more than 75 percent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America were damaged, according to the U.K.’s Interoute Plc, which operates a fiber- optic data network connecting 92 cities. The cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy. In January, an anchor severed the cables outside Alexandria after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast. "

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Comments

malcybood

Good luck GT-Rob - What have you been working on? Re-routing traffic?

GT-Rob

For some yes. We have a couple of manual failovers, but some of the smaller sites are just out of luck. Telco is saying it could be a couple of weeks! And a lot of these places don't celebrate the holidays, so its a pretty big impact.

Turgon

So much for virtualization. It will be a long time before we are less reliant on big cables somewhere.

Kaminsky

Surely publicising things like this represents a massive secutiry gaff, especially in that part of the world.. Now these cables will be a legitimate target against "the west" and Bloomberg has told them exactly where to go looking.

wd40

Internet is slow here now "in the middle east"

Kaminsky:

Actually, Targeting these cables will hurt us "in the middle east", and in turn will hurt them "terrorists" because there financial transactions and communications will be affected.

Small questions.

How much will it cost to repair these cables, and how much was the cost of the cables when they "connected" them..

I mean, I know that the cost is huge, but would it not be a good idea to lay some more cables in other locations ?

tiersten

Turgon wrote:

So much for virtualization. It will be a long time before we are less reliant on big cables somewhere.

Not much you can do about it. Long distance for cheap is pretty much cable only. If they can invent some sort of wormhole then maybe...

binarysoul

Kaminsky wrote:

Now these cables will be a legitimate target against "the west"

Sorry, but I guess you have listened to to many speeches by shoe-hit Bush to make such a statement.

tiersten

wd40 wrote:

How much will it cost to repair these cables, and how much was the cost of the cables when they "connected" them..

It costs an insane amount to repair a cable. You have to get a special cable laying ship which there aren't that many. You have to get it to where your cable is. Find where it is broken. Drag it up from the bottom of the sea. Actually repair it. Drop it back down. Make sure it won't snag anything etc...

wd40 wrote:

I mean, I know that the cost is huge, but would it not be a good idea to lay some more cables in other locations ?

It isn't that easy. The routes are planned to avoid shipping and any undersea faults etc... The main issue is that it is expensive. There was too much cable laid during the dotcom boom and several companies went under when the bubble burst. Too much capacity with nobody to use it.

The last big cable was TAT-14 and that cost over $1.5 billion to do from what I can find out.

tiersten

Kaminsky wrote:

Surely publicising things like this represents a massive secutiry gaff, especially in that part of the world.. Now these cables will be a legitimate target against "the west" and Bloomberg has told them exactly where to go looking.

The cables are already known about. They weren't secret. As others have pointed out, they'd just end up disconnecting themselves.

Turgon

tiersten wrote:

Turgon wrote:

So much for virtualization. It will be a long time before we are less reliant on big cables somewhere.

Not much you can do about it. Long distance for cheap is pretty much cable only. If they can invent some sort of wormhole then maybe...

Very true. Physical layer for the forseeable methinks.

wd40

Thanks for the info tiersten

GT-Rob

A lot of it is still down, and they stuff that is up is incredibly slow. It will be interesting to hear the total cost this has had to the various industries out there (banks, tech companies, phone companies etc). It already been enough so far that a couple of our sites are considering backup sat links.

Turgon

Here's some infomation about TAT-14 mentioned by Tiersten. (not the Middle East situation)

https://www.tat-14.com/tat14/stations.jsp

Some rough seas up there around the North of Scotland. I imagine it was quite an adventure at times laying that cable.

A self healing ring using wavelength division multiplexing. Cool.

It had a problem in 2003 affecting the UK apparently. A cable ship was needed to repair the breaks. Yup it costs a lot of money and a similar approach to the old days of transatlantic cable laying..

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39118125,00.htm

"France Telecom will send a cable ship out to fix and repair the problem," said a BT spokesman, adding that the cause of the problem is not known. It's also not clear how long the fault will take to repair.

As TAT-14 is a dual, bi-directional ring of cable, a single serious fault should not be enough to break it, as traffic would still be able to flow between the countries on the ring. Unfortunately, a part of the cable near the US coast had already suffered a technical fault earlier this month, which meant there was no built-in redundancy to cope with Tuesday's failure. According to BT, the US-side fault should be fixed by the end of this week, which will bring the cable network online again.

Tuesday's failure affected BT's voice calls, rather than its data services, but it is understood that a number of Internet service providers experienced faults.

Vanessa Evans, of LINX, the London Internet Exchange, which carries nearly all UK Internet traffic and over half of Europe's Internet traffic, said she saw a drop in traffic of around two gigabits per second. At its peak, LINX sees 32 gigabits of data every second. She added that the Internet was not broken, as traffic was rerouted through other networks."

coffeeking

Come on aleady! It takes twice as long to get to TE.