Egypt offline for weekend after Med seabed cables cut Internet and phone communications remain troublesome across much of the Middle East today, following a multiple undersea cable break in the Mediterranean on Friday. AP reports that the SEA-ME-WE4 and SEA-ME-WE3 cables were both broken between Sicily and Tunisia, and that a repair ship operated by France Telecom Marine is now …
What do you mean we've lost the SEA-ME-WE3 route, it is backed up on SEA-ME-WE4 and FLAG. ....
Seems like the routes pretty much back each other up. All you need is a bad storm in the area and the ships drop anchor out at sea. They then trawl along the sea bed. Trouble is sub-sea fibre cables are pretty crap at holding a cargo ship in rough high seas.
Same as last year, spent all weekend bouncing traffic over to Singapore and the states on our ULH Mesh systems, just lucky that after all the ad-hoc work they did last year didn’t get taken down properly so it wasn’t too difficult for us to restore pretty much all our traffic. Took longer to get confirmation off the customers, guess they were all out on the piss (like the reg hacks when I first emailed them about this just a couple of hours after it first happened!)
One or two in Mumbai complaining about high latency but when your traffic used to go direct to India and is now heading out to Singapore and the US to get to India it is either that or nothing, you decide :-)
Mines the one with the pay check 16 hours at double time and a chit for two days off in lieu in the pocket
...will happen again.
Perhaps a satellite link would be safer, given it's unlikely to get snagged by a spaceship's anchor. Obviously it's a more expensive option, but given the commercial costs of these seemingly inevitable anchor-based woes it seems, on the basis of no research whatsoever, the way to go in the longer run.
and some space junk busting Klingon will just come along and reduce it to component atoms. Seriously though, the latency on a satellite link doesn't exactly make it an attractive alternative to cables - better to just let the Internet do what it was designed to do and route around the damage.
Thumbs up just for the subheading - it's the silly season after all.
These are terabit cables, satellite links can't handle anything like enough data.
That's why you have two cables as redundancy - of course if they both go into the same exchange on the same beach you are stuffed.
Like the boss putting the backup server next to the main server on the same power strip underneath the same leaky airconditioner.
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