More cable cuts

Last Thurs­day, I posted a brief arti­cle about Inter­net prob­lems in India, Africa and the Mid­dle East. Two under­sea cables had been cut in the Mediter­ranean Sea, near Egypt.

In the fol­low­ing days, two more under­sea cables were dam­aged. The Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune printed an arti­cle about the third cable cut, and Wired fol­lowed suit with its own arti­cle, includ­ing a help­ful map.

This Tues­day, as Reuters was report­ing that a repair ship had reached one of the cut cables, reports sur­faced of a fifth cable cut in the same region. Boing­Bo­ing has been fol­low­ing the cable cut story, and linked to a report from a Dubai news­pa­per. CrunchGear also reported on the fifth cut, and added a global map of high-speed fiber-optic con­nec­tions. Wired claims the fifth cut is actu­ally a cable fail­ure that occurred before the Egypt cuts.

Bruce Schneier has a brief arti­cle with sev­eral links that I’ve used in this article.

All of these cable fail­ures can be repaired. Here’s a link to pic­tures of var­i­ous cable repair ships.

In the mean­time, atten­tion is focused on some­thing most Inter­net users take for granted: the fiber back­bone that sup­ports the Internet.

Tagged as: Africa, data, Dubai, EU, hardware, help, India, Internet, ISP, map, reliability, telecom