Econintersect: On Friday 30 March 2013 Kautstubh Katdare (Crazy Engineers) reported in detail on cable damage, presumably by saboteurs, in the Mediterranean off the cost of Alexandria, Egypt. Internet service has been severely disrupted with operating speeds decreased by as much as 60% when service can actually be obtained. Traffic in Pakastan has been deceased by 50% according the The Tribune Express. The map below from The Guardian shows how traffic from Asia to Europe and the eastern portions of North America goes through a narrow bottleneck from the northeast Indian Ocean coast of Africa to the Mediterranean.
Click on graphic for interactive global cable map at The Guardian.
This is the second fiber optic cable to go out in two weeks. The first was the India-Middle East-Western Europe (I-ME-WE) cable. The cable damaged on 27 March was the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4) cable. Two other cables that connect south Asia between Singapore and France are SEA-ME-WE-3 and TWA-1 according to The Times Express. The
SEA-ME-WE-3 cable was damaged in January near Singapore and remains unrepaired because of Singapore government red tape, according to The Guardian.
From The Times Express:
SEA-ME-WE 4 provides a telecommunications link between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.
The renesys blog reports that other submarine cable damage has occurred as well, specifying the EASSy cable that services Africa but a report by TechZim says that cable has not suffered any damage.
Here is an excerpt from the renesys blog report:
This month’s submarine cable outages have profoundly degraded connectivity to the Middle East, Asia and Africa. In particular, last week’s EASSy and SEACOM outages wiped out connectivity in parts of East Africa from Djibouti to South Africa. As if that weren’t bad enough, the biggest submarine cable connecting Europe and Asia, SeaMeWe-4 suffered a failure at 6:20 UTC, 27 March.
Later in the day, the Egyptian Naval forces claimed that they had caught divers sabotaging a submarine cable off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt. In any event, SMW4 clearly suffered a major failure, and as we will see below, caused widespread disruption of Internet services from Egypt to Pakistan.
A more recent but less encompassing report from The Times of India contained the following:
Internet speeds in India, especially for customers of Bharti Airtel, Tata Communications and state-owned BSNL and MTNL are set to be disrupted for the next 20-25 days, after a key undersea cable, carrying data traffic across 14 countries, from Singapore to France, was cut off the coast of Egypt. Two other key cable networks, linking Asia to Europe, were also allegedly damaged.
The extent of the damage is still being assessed. “Currently, internet and data usage are low because of the festive season. India will feel the impact from Monday when offices and businesses come back. Telcos have diverted all traffic from the Atlantic route to the Pacific, but our connectivity to the latter route is not sufficient to cater to all of India’s traffic,” explained Rajesh Chharia, president at Association of Internet Service Providers of India.
View of underwater fiber optic cable from Kautstubh Katdare, Crazy Engineers.
John Lounsbury with contributions by Rob G.V. Carter.
Sources:
- Slow Internet Connection? You Are Not Alone & Fix Will Take ~25 Days (Kautstubh Katdare, Crazy Engineers, 30 March 2013)
- Underwater cable damaged: Internet speed plummets by 60% nationwide (Farooq Baloch, The Express Tribune, 28 March 2013)
- Damaged undersea internet cable causes widespread service disruption (Amanda Holpuch, The Guardian, 28 March 2013)
- Intrigue Surrounds SMW4 Cut (Doug Madory, renesys blog, 28 March 2013)
- EASSy cable operator speaks on undersea cable outage (TechZim, 26 March 2013)
