There is a very interesting story in parts of the media today. Large parts of the Middle East and (in particular) India are suffering a major internet outage. It seems that a storm in Alexandria in Egypt has led to ships going off course and their anchors damaging the SEA-ME-WE 4 and FLAG fiber optic cables connecting India with Europe and Asia, and capacity to India has thus been reduced. There are some older, lower capacity cables still in use, and there are cables to the US also, but these were the main connections to India. It seems at this point unclear whether the two cables were both ruptures near Alexandria, or whether one of the outages was off Marseilles. But in any event, two of the world’s key cables were damaged within a few hours. This seems quite remarkable. The TWO main cables between Europe and India were both damaged within a matter of hours. It seems an extraordinary coincidence. It may or may not be an extraordinary coincidence, and we will find out.
However, as a science fiction fan and a reader of Wired Magazine, the mention of these two cables brings back a thought of one of the finest articles ever published in the magazine. In 1996, science fiction author Neal Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame) wrote a long and wonderful essay for Wired Magazine entitled “Mother Earth, Motherboard”. This article was written as the 1990s telecoms boom was gearing up to great heights of enthusiasm, and in a period in which global telecoms at least appeared to be gaining new levels of competition. Stephenson wrote about travelling to a large number of locations around the world, watching the laying of an undersea fibre optic cable named FLAG (Fiberoptic Link Around the Globe), or more specifically the section of it connecting Europe and Asia. He discussed the technologies, and the politics, and the history of communications and other related matters that went with it, and the history of the places he saw along the way. In return for paying what must have been a very considerable expense claim, Wired Magazine got a spectacular piece of writing, but Stephenson clearly got more than they did, as many of the locations that were researched for this essay popped up again in considerable detail in his novel Cryptonomicon, and to a lesser extent in his Baroque Trilogy that followed. Many of them cropped up in sections of those novels set in various eras in the past, particularly in the second world war.
The list of places that Stephenson visited during the laying of FLAG has a very trading empire quality about it, and mostly a British trading empire quality about it: Alexandria, Port Said, Bombay, Penang, Hong Kong, Shanghai, places that contain, as Stephenson puts it, “British imperial-era hotels fraught with romance and history, sort of like the entire J. Peterman catalogue rolled into one building”. The reason for the confluence with the British Empire makes perfect sense when you think about it: the strongest parts of the British Empire were outposts to defend Britain’s control of trade routes, and so they are at key points on those trade routes. If you are laying an undersea cable, then you want to lay it along the shortest route that it can safely be placed. What is required is a mixture of minimum distance and political stability. The minimum distances for cables today are the same as the minimum distances for ships in the nineteenth century (and generally for ships today, also). Between Europe and Asia, there are two key bottlenecks through which you must travel, as the alternatives are either much longer or much less politically stable. Those two bottlenecks are of course through Egypt between the Mediterranean and the red sea, and through the Straits of Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. Hence Alexandria and Penang. Of course, these places have been strategic since long before the British Empire, which is why a lighthouse and a library were built in Alexandria, but the British Empire is recent enough for its mood to linger. As I said, Stephenson wrote the essay in the heyday of competitive cable-laying in 1996. Prior to the 1990s global telecommunications generally consisted of state owned or state favoured monopolies in virtually all countries. These companies worked together to build and own infrastructure, including undersea cables. Between Europe and Asia, a consortium named SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia – Middle East – Western Europe) had come into being as a federation of state owned and state favoured telecommunications companies. This was led by AT&T in the US, and Cable & Wireless of the UK – a curious creation that was never a major communications company in the UK but which was in many parts of the former empire. However, by the 1990s, at least competition was allowed in many markets. AT&T was split up into nine companies, and many other countries adopted a model that was initially created in Britain, in which various assets were brought together to create a single, reasonably large competitor to the incumbent. (In Britain, Cable & Wireless was given a licence to compete with BT, which it did under the brand name “Mercury”, with rather mixed success for the company although with clearly positive effects for consumers).
This was an era in which fixed line phone companies were still believed to rule the world. More importantly, their banks believed this also, so capital was cheap. The companies had not yet figured out that mobile telephony would soon be everything as far as voice traffic was concerned, and the existence of the internet as a mainstream phenomenon was something they were only just noticing. They knew that there would be data services, but they thought that data services were something they could design and control.
So what we had was a group of new, highly capitalised fixed line phone companies who believed they needed to own their own infrastructure. These companies often had a legal right to build infrastructure in the same places as the incumbents – a concession made by governments to promote competition. And this is where FLAG came from. It was led by NYNEX, one of the “Baby Bells” (RBOCs) that had been spun off AT&T. It was a consortium of second telecommunications companies from various countries, that was building its own pipes to compete with the incumbents. In the US, the companies that had been spun off AT&T were very eager to expand abroad and to compete with one another and their former parent company. Plus, the same imperatives that led to the incumbents’ cables tracing the routes between the grand hotels of the former British Empire meant that FLAG followed essentially the same route as SEA-ME-WE. In the real routing bottlenecks the two cables were built side by side, at times going through the same buildings and through the same tunnels. There is a good map that illuminates these details here.
Which is how what happened yesterday is possible. Apparently circumstances led to ships in Alexandria sailing in unusual locations yesterday. Anchors went down in usual places. And, apparently, both FLAG and SEA-ME-WE 4 were ruptured. One would hope that the redundancy due to the fact that there are two competing cable companies would have led to some protection against accident or sabotage, but it seems that the fact that the two cables are right next to one another simply meant that a change in shipping conditions can take out both together.
However, when we think about the consequences of this, we discover how the world has changed in the last decade. If you read Stephenson’s article, you get the impression that FLAG was all about connecting the rich countries of Europe with the rich countries of Australasia and East Asia. India is mentioned a couple of times in the 40,000 words of the essay, but it is mentioned in passing, and it does not seem he visited. News stories today are all about the Middle East and particularly India losing their net access. China, Australia, Japan, and Korea are unaffected. This is not because these places do not communicate with Europe, but because there is plenty of capacity across the Pacific and across the Atlantic that there is no trouble rerouting their communications via the United States. FLAG and SEA-ME-WE have actually become the main means of communicating with India and the Middle East, places where a lot has happened economically in the last ten years.
The belief that secondary, competing fixed line phone companies were important to the future died sometime around 2001. If these companies had mobile subsidiaries, they discovered that the mobile subsidiaries were their main sources of profitability. Capital became expensive. The rates that could be charged at wholesale level for international voice services dropped to something close to zero. Ventures like FLAG did not make money for the sorts of services that their investors and builders had hoped. NYNEX is now part of Verizon, and AT&T is now part of Southwestern Bell Corporation (although, confusingly, the whole company took the AT&T name). Neither company is terribly interested in bold international ventures any more, and they instead spend their time concentrating on their US mobile networks and attempting to screw as much money out of their legacy customers as possible. Second, competing, fixed line telephone companies generally got into financial trouble and were sold to former incumbents from foreign countries or to mobile companies or both, which led to the owners of SEA-ME-WE gaining shares in FLAG as well. There is still healthy competition in some telecommunications markets (Britain is extremely competitive – I would say the US is less so), but not so much from the companies that were created by governments and regulators in the 1980s and 1990s.
And what happened to FLAG? Well, in 2000 there was an awful lot of undersea optical fibre capacity, that was not being used in the way the people had build it intended. Inevitably, it ended up carrying a great deal of internet traffic. This coincided with a huge rise in the tech sector in places like India and China. Partly because of this, it became cheap for India to provide certain kinds of services to Europe and the US, because the cost of communicating with India became negligible. FLAG itself ended up being bought by an Indian conglomerate, Reliance Industries. What goes around comes around.
I’ve been following this on the North American Network Operators mail list and an international outages mail list. Your point about the old British Empire has been mentioned there as well. The major landing points for cables are in major Empire locations.
Since you brought up the subject, this just in on ‘outages’ list:
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http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/third-undersea-cable-reportedly-cut/story.aspx?guid={1AAB2A79-E983-4E0E-BC39-68A120DC16D9}
“We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything,” one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones. The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.
Just a couple of comments:
How much has this affected those in Europe and the USA?
I cannot talk for those in the USA, but over here we had to find out through the news, because as far as online services go, we could not care less.
What does that last answer mean?
Well, so much for the developing economies that are supposed to be supplanting The West in the World economy. One of the main “rising powers” gets its Internet screwed up and what happens: nothing. Now just think what would have happened if the connections between Europe and the USA got severed…? Exactly.
Michael, off Land’s End (I think) there is a small building near where the cables laid by the Victorians to the USA were put down. The laying of cables was, in its time, an enormous engineering feat, particularly given the dangers of putting down such things at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Cryptonomicon is indeed a bloody brilliant book. I look forward to what Stephenson comes up with next.
Nice article, Michael.
Here in Israel there were no interruptions – I wonder who owns our cables.
I just finished reading Cryptonomicon and it was excellent! Anyone want to buy my copy?
Jonathan: It is not quite at Land’s end, but at Porthcurno, which is just a few kilometres around the Cornish shore from Land’s End. I have been there: I went there specifically to see the cable museum and the cable landings.
The modern landings (including FLAG and SEA-ME-WE) are extremely close to the 19th century and 20th century landings – just a few tens of metres away I think. The modern landings are buried so there is not much to see. The same issue applies as for places like Penang and Alexandria though. Once the ideal spot has been located, it keeps being the ideal spot and keeps being used. The geography of the world remains a big deal.
Frederick: What does it mean? It means that bandwidth to areas handled by those fibres has decreased. It means you might find long latencies looking at a web site in India due to the ‘traffic jam’ on the alternate routes.
This sort of thing happens all the time in the US. There is an old joke amongst network engineers:
Q: If a Network Engineer is lost in the desert how does he find out which way to go?
A: He takes out the one meter section of optic fibre he keeps in his back pocket and lays it on the ground. When the backhoe arrives, he asks directions.
Porthcurno – that brings back memories of “The Great Humming God” of Christopher Hodder-Williams; anybody read that out there?
Otherwise it reminds me of the Times headline “Continent isolated” when the channel was fogged over. So, who is cut off?
I find myself looking at the map and wondering what sort of traffic would be redirected through US based routers. Since I don’t know about the land based lines, I don’t know the answer to that.
Depending on where the third break was, the first thing that comes to mind is that most traffic between eastern Mideast Islamic states and Europe might now be going through US routers. Other possibilities?
Depending on where the third break was, the first thing that comes to mind is that most traffic between eastern Mideast Islamic states and Europe might now be going through US routers.
Due to who laid the cable back in ye olde days, it was pretty likely to be going through routers owned by US telecom companies at some point, even if the routers were not physically located in the US. I doubt I need to explain the implications.
I loved Mother Earth Mother Board – and I also recollected it after hearing about the cable breach. It’s distressing to me that WIRED has in the last 18 months or so become a clearinghouse for socialist climate pseudoscience. I no longer purchase the magazine.
Someone contact Oliver Stone at once! It has to be a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Lingster
I was wondering if I were the only one to notice the difference at Wired. They appear to have strayed quite far from their Mondo2000 roots.
Though I do still receive the magazine… I mean, you can’t beat the price, $12.00 US a year, for staying abreast of what the other side is thinking.
Good post here by the way. Very useful to be reminded of how the more things change the more they stay the same.
That news of the third cut is very interesting.
Wretched nitpick to a phenomenal bit of blogging: AT&T is owned by SBC, the former Southwestern Bell (historically headquartered in St Louis, now in San Antonio), not Bell South (Atlanta).
That’s fair nitpicking, although the issue is only ultimately the direction of the mergers. (Damn though. I shouldn’t have made that mistake). The final three companies that merged to become the new AT&T were SBC, BellSouth, and AT&T, but it was SBC that bought the old AT&T, renamed itself as the new AT&T, and then the combined entity bought BellSouth, mainly so that it gained control of 100% of Cingular. This fits in with what I had to say in the post about mobiles, of course.
I have now corrected the text of the post.
That news of the third cut is very interesting.
Indeed it is. Tehran (and possibly all of Iran) appears to be offline.
I well remember reading that article back in 1996 – it was a gripping tale and ever so well written. I may even still have that issue of the magazine.
And I thought of it as well when I heard of these outages.
A lifetime ago I worked the FLAG project in the wining and dining stages as they were trying to sell the thing. One of the explicit sales points was that it was a way to reduce the risk of cut communications when California had a bad quake. FLAG was (at least when I worked there) 3 pairs of 5GB fiber optics, two pairs for signal and a 3rd for redundancy. A friendly engineer who was on the project told me that adding another pair would have cost $1/km or $27,000 for another the full length of the system. The suits wouldn’t go for it because they just weren’t sure that they could profitably fill a cable with that much extra bandwidth and they weren’t about to waste $27k on dark fiber.
NYNEX was like that a lot. It’s one of the reasons why NYNEX is no more (its purchaser, Bell Atlantic, was eventually folded into Verizon).
Fiber is incredibly cheap and laying it down dark as a speculative investment makes a lot of sense.
Keep in mind that fibre cuts are only rarely news, but they happen all the time. As I said earlier, I subscribe to a number of Network Operators news letters, not because I am one (I was 10 years ago) but because the operations of some of my personal consulting customers can sometimes be effected.
I get an outage report every couple days and a big one every few weeks.
There are sometimes ‘amazing’ clusters of events… back when I was an operator in Ireland with leased line customers there was one day in which a huge number of lines in the US were cut by accident. One big one was due to a train derailment; others were back hoe’s and such but they all happened within a span of a few days and represented quite a significant amount of capacity for that period of time.
I think my private email on the topic even ended up in The Happy Hacker or some such internet underground publication.
The biggest event in recent times was the massive loss offshore from Taiwan after a quake. I think that was just this last year.
I agree with the comments on dark fibre btw… I note also that at the time they laid those down they were running only single mode; the advance of technology has allowed they to run more ‘channels’ through the fibres, at least some of the ones out of the UK. I remember chatting with the head sales guy at NTL about it when they first got in the internet business … and I was CTO for one of the then major players in NI.
That article was the high water mark for Wired. I remember reading it and just being blown away with how good it was.
Wired lost it’s way LONG ago but I enjoyed the adolescent paranoia while it lasted. Discover has also descended into BDS and climate change craziness. Too bad Omni jumped the shark in the early 90’s. We are running out of good science magazines! Popular Science may be the last hold out.
A real paranoiac might say that the lines were cut so that communications would route through the US allowing the NSA to intercept datastreams…
What would the standard leftist reaction be if it somehow could be shown that we are ‘listening’ to web traffic in and out of Iran and the arab countries?