Submarine cable damage brings internet pain to Asia, Africa

Internet users across Asia appear to be suffering from degraded performance after a major submarine cable was severed. Pakistan's telecoms authority flagged the cable cut. Dual cut in the terrestrial segment of SEAMEWE-5 between the cities of Abu Talab and Zafrana in Egypt have been reported. Alternate arrangements to provide …

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Dial before you dig

Damn archaeologists

[David 132]

Re: Dial before you dig

Well there's criminal damage, which is cutting cables, and then there's accidentally excavating a graveyard... which is merely skulduggery.

[ThatOne]

Re: Dial before you dig

> Damn archaeologists

Say what? Did they bury the cable through an ancient necropolis, or did the archeologists decided to dig up 20th century Suez Canal pipe ducts?

[YetAnotherXyzzy]

Although the article describes the cable's route and thank you for that, adding a map as well would have useful. I'm not geographically challenged but some people are.

(I'm tempted to add something snarky about less useful embedded tweets, but that horse left the barn years ago.)

[Norman Nescio]

Thankfully, roughly another 18 cables also pass between the two Egyptian cities, so re-routing options won't be hard to find for SEA-ME-WE-5's carrier customers.

That's not true at all, and depends on whether the carriers in question have contracts with the cable operator(s) for re-routes. It's not an automatic freebie that comes with the purchase of capacity - you want back-up, you pay for it.

Large carriers can re-groom on their own systems, which will have capacity on more than one cable route, so don't need operator provided backup. Smaller operations might well operate on the 'everything has been fine so far' principle and simply have to wait until a repair is effected, with all sorts of possibilities in between. The equipment to light up fibres isn't cheap, so you don't tend to have some lying around unused until it's needed. There are also hierarchies of re-route precedence, so you might have to wait a while until your circuit is threaded through the rats-nest of carrier interconnects. And, needless to say, but I'll say it anyway, if you don't have an existing agreement, you can't simply hop from SEAMEWE-5 to another cable system, and wanting to do so quickly will be (a) expensive and (b) an exercise in frustrating logistics and contracts.

NN

[Kernel]

" an exercise in frustrating logistics and contracts."

Oh yes! I've spent many an hour on the phone waiting for someone at the other end to get an engineer organized to make the necessary network changes to fulfill pre-arranged restoration plans.

Usually, success in this endeavour is immediately followed by complaints from those who completely failed to understand what the phrase "you're getting this international capacity cheap because it will be pre-empted to restore other, more important, customers in the event of $cable failing" means in real life.