Ship Anchor, Not Sabotaging Divers, Possibly Responsible For Outage 43
Nerval's Lobster writes "This week, Egypt caught three men in the process of severing an undersea fiber-optic cable. But Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the reason for the region's slowdowns was not the alleged saboteurs — it was damage previously caused by a ship. On March 22, cable provider Seacom reported a cut in its Mediterranean cable connecting Southern and Eastern Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Europe; it later suggested that the most likely cause of the incident was a ship anchor, and that traffic was being routed around the cut, through other providers. But repairs to the cable took longer than expected, with the Seacom CEO announcing March 23 that the physical capability to connect additional capacity to services in Europe was "neither adequate nor stable enough," and that it was competing with other providers. The repairs continued through March 27, after faults were found on the restoration system; that same day, Seacom denied that the outage could have been the work of the Egyptian divers, but said that the true cause won't be known for weeks. 'We think it is unlikely that the damage to our system was caused by sabotage,' the CEO wrote in a statement. 'The reasons for this are the specific location, distance from shore, much greater depth, the presence of a large anchored vessel on the fault site which appears to be the cause of the damage and other characteristics of the event.'"
Re:Seems to happen regularly (Score:4, Informative)
There are, for reasons of not digging trenches through the Sahara, limited routes between the Indian and the Mediterranean. Vast amounts of ship traffic move along the same routes and every now and then tend to do stupid things. That area is a natural choke point and unfortunately it increases the likelihood of cable cuts.
If you examine cable faults on undersea cables, most tend to occur at these choke points. Seacom for example has not had breaks further south where the landing points are kept well clear, by 50 to 100km, of the harbours in southern Africa.
Re:Backhoes and anchors attracted to cables ... (Score:5, Informative)
I have a question. Why don't they put these cables where ships don't anchor, rather than laying them right straight through the harbour?
They generally don't lay them in areas where ships anchor. Plus in a harbor ships are generally docked or moored at predetermined locations. There is not a lot or stopping wherever you like and dropping an anchor, that interferes with navigation in the harbor.
Moorings are also usually strategically placed in a harbor. When the tide turns around, boats will swing around 180 degrees. So each mooring should be clear in a 360 degree circle for a distance which corresponds to the length of the intended boat. An anchor has a much larger circle than a mooring, and when the tide turns, an anchor sometimes lets go or drags depending on the design. People dropping anchor anywhere they like in the harbor could cause a collision when the tide turned. So in many places there are rules that you can't anchor in the harbor anyways. I have seen plenty of cables in harbors for exactly these reasons.