Mediterranean Undersea Cables Cut, Again

miller60 writes "Three undersea cables in the Mediterranean Sea have failed within minutes of each other in an incident that is eerily similar to a series of cable cuts in the region in early 2008. The cable cuts are already causing serious service problems in the Middle East and Asia. See coverage at the Internet Storm Center, Data Center Knowledge and Bloomberg. The February 2008 cable cuts triggered rampant speculation about sabotage, but were later attributed to ships that dropped anchor in the wrong place."

Re:Reroute? Hmmmmm....

[GiMP]

Besides the nefarious reasons, there is the simple matter of cost -- transit in the US is cheaper.

Looks like anchor drag to me.

[Behrooz]

Cables going to very close shore landing points between similar destinations tend to be pretty close together, saves significantly on the survey costs.

The article's timing of the outages (SeaMeWe 3&4 within minutes, FLAG half an hour later) and the relative proximity of the cable courses suggests either anchor drag or someone who cares enough to make it look that way.

Chalk up another victory for geographically dispersed redundancy.

Re:Cross Country Links?

[Ironica]

The article claims that India is "82% Out of serivce". Something that I've always been curious about through is smaller inter country links and Internet connectivity. That is to say, if minor yet not insignificant links exist between Indian Telecoms and Pakistani Telecoms, and also between Pakistani Telecoms and Iranian Telecoms, and so on and so on... Then is it still possible due to the capabilities of packet switching, that computers in India could still communicate with ones in the US via a very, very long and convoluted path through many, many local connections?

From TFA:
"A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC gave an estimate of the following impact on the voice traffic..."

So the 82% applies to voice phone service, not computer data. Voice can still be packet-switched, sure... but usually isn't.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean subs can go past 20,000 and not crush like eggs?

Subs don't have to, the Mediterranean Sea is 5150m at its deepest point [msn.com] (~16900 feet) and averages 1500m deep.

Re:Now hold on

[interstellar_donkey]

Arr.

It be Sammy the Sea Sucker, a giant whale that has been legend for hundreds of years. He can sink down to the bottom of the ocean, and when Ol' Sammy sees something he don't like, he eats right through it.

And let me tell ya', Sammy don't like cable.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[Zocalo]

It's hardly a big secret. There have been the USS Parche [wikipedia.org] and the USS Jimmy Carter [wikipedia.org] to name just two.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[CheddarHead]

Yes, we do. Try reading this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/006097771X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229720621&sr=8-3 [amazon.com]

Also, what makes you think that the cables are always in water that deep? They have to come ashore some time, so they always enter shallower water at some point. Ships don't carry 20,000 foot long anchor chains either. Regardless of how they were cut, these cables were cut in relatively shallow water.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[lgw]

Do you seriously doubt that Iran has serious economic difficulties, and is proping itself up with oil money? Here's a recent cite [rferl.org]; Google finds dozens.

Do you seriously doubt that the demographic shift in Iran threatens the party in power? Most of the links I could find had an axe to grind in American politics, but this one [alternet.org] has lots of actual data.

Do you seriously think Iran's government could benefit by starting a war with America by attacking Iraq right now? It's not like we have a tripwire base there, like we did in Korea for so many years: we have most of our armed forces mobilized in Iraq, and regime change in Iran is still official US policy.

I'm sorry to puncture your conspiracy theory so thoroughly, but the idea that the US would be cutting data cables used by a large chunk of the world just to mess with Iran is simply not rational.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[mr_mischief]

A typical manned sub can't go that deep because it's hollow on the inside. A robotic sub that's tethered to it can.

How deep do you really think the Mediterranean is, though? I'll give you a hint: it's less than 5,000 feet deep on average and shallower along the coastlines. The convenient thing about an undersea cable when you go to tap it is that it's connected to a communications building on land somewhere. We're not, as I understand it, interested in tapping the internal communications of deep sea colonies just yet. So perhaps, just perhaps, a submarine wouldn't have to go to the deepest part of the oceans to tap an undersea cable that is guaranteed to come above the water's surface at its endpoint.

History lesson

[david_thornley]

Shortly after the start of World War I, the British cut the cable going directly from Europe to America, so that all communications had to go via Britain. This allowed them to intercept the Zimmerman telegram (among other things), which was what caused the US to declare war in 1917.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[redcaboodle]

Umm... just how deep do you think the Mediterranean Sea is?

Apparently 20,000 leagues.

20k leagues under the sea is not referring to the actual depth but to the distance covered during the trip.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[MrSteveSD]

At current oil prices the current Iranian government is certain to collapse.

They once had a parliamentary democracy of course, but the leader, Mossadegh, committed the heinous crime of trying to get a better oil deal for his country. This resulted in the US and UK backing a coup which installed the Shah of Iran, a dictator who would rule with an Iron fist for decades. His CIA-trained secret police (the SAVAK) tortured and murdered thousands. The inevitable backlash unfortunately resulted in a theocracy rather than the democracy the people we hoping for.

Iran's demographics favor a serious culture shift soon. The ruling theocracy has dealt with this [b]repeatedly in the past by going to war[/b], often wars so nasty that they killed off the majority of males in their 20s, directly changing the demographics.

Iran has not attacked another country for centuries. Iraq started the war with Iran and was supported by the US, UK and others. It was a devastating war but rather than trying to stop it, we poured fuel on the fire hoping that Saddam would win. The support for Iraq was so great that the US even tried to blame the Iranians for Saddam's chemical attack on Halabja. So we wreck one democracy and install a dictator. Then when he is overthrown we back the neighbouring dictator in a devastating war.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[chrb]

There's an interesting ZDNet article on the cable intercept submarines [zdnet.com]. I think it was actually on Slashdot years ago..ah yes, here we go [slashdot.org].

Re: Dropping Anchor

[carlzum]

That's funny, I was going to say the same thing until I realized that I honestly didn't know that. It turns out a league is 4 km (in the modern metric system at least). Even in Journey to the Center of the Earth they didn't go nearly that deep.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[MaskedSlacker]

A league is 3 NAUTICAL miles, not 4 km, closer to 5.5 km.

20,000 leagues, is roughly 3 times the circumference of the earth. It's impossible to go that deep.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[smoker2]

Did you think that the fiber is one long piece stretching right across the ocean ? Because it isn't. There are repeater modules every kilometre (IIRC) which boost the signal and send it on. If a few of those are more than just repeaters (ie splitters) then it becomes trivial to grab a copy of all data that runs through that fibre. If there is redundant fibre in the cable, then conceivably, every fibre carrying data has a copy which runs right to where the govt. wants it.
I used to work for Nortel, making these repeaters by the thousand. They don't have to splice anything into the cable because the taps were already put in during the construction phase.

Re:Cross Country Links?

[raju1kabir]

Posting from Malaysia, here. Some article I just saw claimed we were down 55% of network capacity, though my DSL seems to be working the same as ever.

Being a bit of an internet backwater and having experienced the effects of several major cuts over the past few years, Malaysia might be a good example to illustrate your question.

Our fattest pipes head westward, to the Pacific and onward to the USA. There's also an eastward connection via India and the Middle East to Europe.

When the westward connection is dead, traffic to the USA follows the eastward route to Europe, which quickly gets congested.

When the eastward connection is dead (like now), traffic to Europe follows the westward connection via the USA, which doesn't get so congested but adds considerable latency (see depressing traceroute snippet to Germany below, which I've done just now):

6 202.188.0.11 (202.188.0.11) 13.918 ms 14.804 ms 14.032 ms
7 219.94.9.178 (219.94.9.178) 369.336 ms 295.869 ms 295.631 ms
8 e8-9.cx1.lax1.as3356.gw2.arbinet.net (204.8.22.50) 334.509 ms 296.449 ms 292.072 ms
9 vlan99.csw4.losangeles1.level3.net (4.68.20.254) 301.650 ms 300.529 ms 305.384 ms
10 ae-93-93.ebr3.losangeles1.level3.net (4.69.137.45) 299.902 ms 294.792 ms 292.803 ms
11 ae-4.ebr4.washington1.level3.net (4.69.132.82) 363.228 ms 369.106 ms 360.929 ms
12 ae-74-74.csw2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.182) 373.890 ms 360.926 ms 361.199 ms
13 ae-72-72.ebr2.washington1.level3.net (4.69.134.149) 359.684 ms 359.320 ms 359.477 ms
14 * ae-42-42.ebr2.paris1.level3.net (4.69.137.53) 486.695 ms 463.081 ms
15 ae-2-2.ebr1.frankfurt1.level3.net (4.69.132.142) 447.053 ms 447.918 ms 448.363 ms

This works because the Malaysian ISPs already have agreements with their peers on the other end of the cables for onward transit.

There are also links to Thailand but these do not include onward transit agreements, so when Malaysia was badly slowed down by the Taiwan cable cut, which didn't really affect Thailand, no traffic was routed north from here (except bilateral communications, such as Malaysians surfing Thai web sites). Some enterprising Malaysians did discover that they could get good global web surfing by using Thai ISPs' proxy servers, but if the general public here tried that, it would have quickly overwhelmed Thailand's comparatively puny links to the rest of the world.

Some Malaysian ISPs do have arrangements to route traffic through our extremely well-connected southern neighbour, Singapore. For large volumes of traffic, however, this is more expensive than going straight out on the international cables that land in Malaysia, so it seems to be reserved as a last-ditch option except for some smaller ISPs that use it as a primary link.

To sum up: Yeah, it works, as long as you have options. If you are a large/wealthy/technophilic country surrounded by small/poor/technophobic neighbours, then you will probably not have many.

Re: Dropping Anchor

[smithmc]

1,000 feet is the max operating depth of an LA class submarine

The Los Angeles class is no longer the latest 'n' greatest. The Seawolf class has been tested to 610 meters, e.g. about 2000 feet. Also, one of the Seawolf class, the Jimmy Carter, was specifically modified for "special underwater operations", putatively for SEAL team deployments and such, but who's to say...?