Conspiracy
I reckon it was MOSSAD, it's definitely a conspiracy, this sort of thing can never be a cock up.
No, really.
Epic net outage in Africa as FOUR undersea cables chopped
Underwater data cables linking East Africa to the Middle East and Europe have been severed, bringing transfer rates to their knees in nine countries. In a bizarre coincidence, a ship allegedly dropped anchor off the coast of Kenya on Saturday in a restricted area, cutting The East African Marine Systems (TEAMS) cable - shortly …
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 13:07 GMT SteveK
Re: 650 feet is shallow waters?
650 feet = 198 meters = 0.123 miles, not half a mile. Or are you including drag and water currents to work out the length of cable needed to still be scraping the bottom from a vessel moving on the surface rather than just trailing along in the water?
Maybe it's been stolen and sold as scrap? :)
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 15:11 GMT SkippyBing
Re: Re: 650 feet is shallow waters?
I believe he's including the anchor scope in his calculation, the weight of the cable on the seabed is as important as the hook at the end in holding a ship in position so you need more than enough cable to touch the seabed. 650' is still shallow in the grand scheme of things though, trans-oceanic cables are several miles down.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 15:39 GMT Field Marshal Von Krakenfart
Re: Re: 650 feet is shallow waters?
Nautical mile Shirley (for the pendants among you),
1 Nautical Mile = 6,076.1 feet, therefore 650ft = 0.106976515 mile = 1415.197 Linguine = 21.4912 Double-decker bus or 1.4327 Brontosaurusesesesesesss
Paris, 'cos I wouldn't care if was a nautical mile high or a land mile high.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 19:55 GMT Kernel
Re: 650 feet is shallow waters?
The record for retrieving and repairing a cable is from a depth of 10km - work out how much trailing rope that would take, and then contemplate the difficulty of finding and cutting the cable initially, and then having to hook and retrieve each side of the cut to effect the repair.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 13:08 GMT Anonymous Coward
Incautious trawling
I remember when working in an exchange near Dover in the seventies where undersea cables terminated being told about an incident where the same trawler went through 3 cables in a row. Apparantly when the idiot caught them in his nets he went through the cables with an oxy-acetylene torch and was caught about to do this to a fourth by a boarding party. He didn't seem fully to appreciate until he lost his boat in the civil courts that he would have been compensated for his nets if he'd stopped and reported this unwelcome catch, and that the lost telephony traffic was worth a lot more than his boat.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 17:05 GMT Xenobyte
Re: Three weeks without internet?
Depends on which type of company I guess... A hosting company like the one I'm working for would be rather paralyzed without Internet. Same thing with a newspaper or similar.
But your run-of-the-mill office might experience a change in pace... Old previously thought long extinct ways of wasting time would be making a huge comeback...
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 23:48 GMT Milo Minderbinder
Re: Three weeks without internet?
"...productivity would be through the roof".
Nope - everything would come to a grinding halt. We had a couple of outages at my previous employer (where I did desktop support/server admin/network maintenance and troubleshooting).
When I noticed everyone was sitting around, drinking coffee and playing solitaire, I asked why they were not working (out of curiosity - we had been outsourced to another company, so technically it was none of my business), only to be told that they cannot do anything or communicate with anyone, since the network is down.
So I said "How did we work five years ago, before we had e-mail?"
It just never crossed their minds that they could still call on the phone and send faxes.
Tbh, some people really did not appreciate that.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 14:52 GMT Lee Dowling
Several thousand kilometres at 100m per junction? I think it'd be more a pain in powering those intermediate hubs/switches than anything else (but otherwise would be perfectly feasible for runs on the same order of magnitude).
Gimme a solar-powered, floating, 2-port Gigabit Ethernet repeater/switch and you could cable just about anywhere. :-)
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 14:33 GMT Anonymous Coward
Meanwhile, Internet faster than ever in East Africa
Can't get good saboteurs these days can you? Typical story... job left half done. Down here in Tanzania, one of the supposedly freshly benighted spots, there's currently no difference to the round trip time: 244ms ping, can't be satellite, so some cable is still connected. Speed seems faster than usual too (admittedly that isn't saying much), which one would imagine mightn't be the case if the chopped fibre customers were all being diverted onto the one remaining cable.
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Tuesday 28th February 2012 19:31 GMT Skilpadsop
South Africa
Some ISPs in South Africa are also affected. Everybody still has international connectivity through the two older cables, but for the last 10 days I've been getting less than 20KB/s when streaming video on my home ISP, instead of the usual 120 KB/s. My HSPA+ connection(differant ISP) had no issues though.
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Wednesday 29th February 2012 03:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: To the CLoud Redux
I think you'll find that the United States and Europe cannot be cut off from the internet by two boats - particularly as they, for all intents and purposes, *are* the internet.
'The cloud' has its drawbacks (the name, for one) and strengths, but for anyone in an industrialized nation, the worry of suddenly having your data sliced off by an errant fishing boat is remote.
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Tuesday 6th March 2012 22:49 GMT Anomalous Cowturd
@ Carrawaystick
I was going to follow up that very point on an earlier post, but couldn't be bothered...
However, the highly regarded Wikipedia states:
The international nautical mile was defined by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference, Monaco (1929) as exactly 1852 metres.[1] This is the only definition in widespread current use, and is the one accepted by the International Hydrographic Organization and by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM).
What we both thought of as a proper nautical mile, is in fact, a sea mile. Vis:
In English usage, a sea mile is, for any latitude, the length of one minute of latitude at that latitude. It varies from about 1,842.9 metres (6,046 ft) at the equator to about 1,861.7 metres (6,108 ft) at the poles, with a mean value of 1,852.3 metres (6,077 ft).[6] The international nautical mile was chosen as the integer number of metres closest to the mean sea mile.
So, we are both wrong. And right.
HTH.
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Wednesday 29th February 2012 09:21 GMT John Smith 19
Cockup versus conspiriacy.
Well..
4 cables in a *very* short space of time does look pretty suspicious. While 650 feet is one serious anchor cable.
Now there are people who do sea bed trawling for things like shell fish. They would go along the sea bed and an unscrupulous captain *could* read "restricted" area as "unfished" area, hence loaded with booty and worth a go.
Which begs the question of how common sea bed trawling is in Africa?
I don't think there's a shortage of unscrupulous captains who would try.
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Wednesday 29th February 2012 09:46 GMT Dave Bell
Why undersea?
Of course, it does look a bit silly to be running a cable underwater up the narrow Red Sea, but when you look at the neighbouring countries you wonder if things could be any safer by land.
The first telegraph cable from London to India went mostly underwater for similar reasons of security. Some of those little red dots on the map were there to provide telegraph stations.
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Wednesday 29th February 2012 16:33 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Why undersea?
Cost at sea. Hire of boat + x km of cable
Cost on land. Permits, payments to landowners, bribes to local officials, hiring JCBs, digging a tunnel alongside a road, building a conduit, closing roads and building tunnels under them, building your own road and bridges where there aren't any - plus the cost of x km of cable.
Then you have the risk - there are a lot more idiots with JCBs than there are idiots with anchors. Undersea cables are only really vulnerable when approaching land, there aren't a lot of people anchoring in 3000m deep oceans.
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