Retrogoddamgrade Mercury
Cable Break Causes Wide Internet Outage
Jan 31, 2008
By MATTHEW ROSENBERG
NEW DELHI (AP) - At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp. (SYMC), a security software maker based in California. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the scope was wide: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labor for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by Friday, the state news agency reported.
The snapped cables - which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb - caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.
There was concern for millions of South Asians who send money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards - but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi's UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.
The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company's 53 branches to send money home.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.
Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well - but smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.
"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If something happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry will suffer."
Many larger U.S. companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were intact.
Citigroup Inc. spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company's customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."
Intel Corp. (INTC) said its Indian operation, which employs about 3,000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.
"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel's South Asia business operations.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.
Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism - but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Finger-Thin Cables Tie Internet Together
Jan 31, 2008
By PETER SVENSSON
NEW YORK (AP) - The lines that tie the globe together by carrying phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick where they lie on the ocean floor.
The foundation for a connected world seems quite fragile, an impression reinforced this week when a break in two cables in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted communications across the Middle East and into India and neighboring countries.
Yet the network itself is fairly resilient. In fact, cables are broken all the time, usually by fishing lines and ship anchors, and few of us notice. It takes a confluence of factors for a cable break to cause an outage.
"Most telecom companies have capacity at multiple systems, so if one goes out, they simply reroute to a different system," said Stephan Beckert, analyst at research firm TeleGeography in Washington. "It's just that in this case, both the main route and the backup route got cut for a lot of companies."
The two cables - FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 - were cut on the ocean floor just north of Alexandria, Egypt.
By an accident of geography and global politics, Egypt is a choke point in the global communications network, just as it is with global shipping. The reasons are the same: The country touches both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which flows into the India Ocean.
The slim fiber-optic cables that carry the world's communications are much like ships, in that they're the cheapest way for carrying things over long distances. Pulling cable overland is much more expensive and requires negotiation with landowners and governments.
So fiber-optic cables that go from Europe to India take the sea route via Egypt's Suez Canal, just as ships do.
Another Mediterranean cable makes land not far away, in Israel.
But there's no cable overland from Israel into Jordan and to the Persian Gulf, which could have provided a redundant connection for the Gulf States and India. Going overland would have been more expensive and politically difficult - Israel and Arab countries would have to cooperate.
There is also no route that goes through Russia, Iran and Pakistan to India. The terrain is rugged, Pakistan is politically unstable, and India and Pakistan are not on good terms.
With two of the three cables passing through Suez cut, traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to route eastward, around most of the globe.
The main route goes through Japan and the United States, crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. According to Beckert, this is normally the cheap way to go for Indian traffic, since capacity is high. However, the distance means more time required to reach Europe and get a response.
The other route from India to Europe goes over China into Russia and along the Trans-Siberian railroad.
Egypt is not the only check point in the global network. The ocean just south of Taiwan proved to be one in December 2006, when an earthquake cut seven of eight cables passing through the area, slowing down communications in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia for months.
Another possible vulnerability is the U.S. island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. It is the spider at the center of a web cables from the United States, Japan, Australia, the Philippines and China.
Both cables that connect the United States to Australia and New Zealand run over Hawaii, creating another choke point.
These bottlenecks are likely to go away, however, as telecoms build more and more lines. Another U.S.-Australia line is scheduled to be completed soon, according to Beckert, and a U.S.-China line that bypasses Japan is also in the works.
But it will be years before the network across Asia is as resilient as the trans-Atlantic network, where multiple high-capacity lines over different routes provide a connection that's almost impossible to disrupt. And the factors that make the Suez Canal a vulnerable point now will likely remain.
Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" communications networks, he said.
Yet the owners of the undersea cables aren't very concerned with terrorism, according to Beckert. They're too busy worrying about fishing boats.
"They want to publish maps of their cables as widely as possible, so fishing crews know where they are," Beckert said. "The risk of accidental cuts is much, much greater than the risk of deliberate cuts."
It's a series of cables, not tubes!
