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?