First
A flotilla of ships may have been dispatched to reinstate the broken submarine cable that has left the Middle East and India struggling to communicate with the rest of the world, but it took just one vessel to inflict the damage that brought down the internet for millions.
According to reports, the internet blackout, which has left 75 million people with only limited access, was caused by a ship that tried to moor off the coast of Egypt in bad weather on Wednesday. Since then phone and internet traffic has been severely reduced across a huge swath of the region, slashed by as much as 70% in countries including India, Egypt and Dubai.
While tens of millions have been directly affected, the impact of the blackout has spread far wider, with economies across Asia and the Middle East struggling to cope. Governments have also become directly involved, with the Egyptian communications ministry imploring surfers to stay offline so business traffic can take priority. "People who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do," said ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur.
But as backroom staff at businesses across the globe scrambled to reroute their traffic or switch on backup satellite systems, experts said the incident highlighted the fragility of a global communications network we take for granted.
"People just don't realize that all these things go through undersea cables - that this is the main way these economies are all linked," said Alan Mauldin, the research director of TeleGeography. "Even when you're using wireless internet, it's only really wireless back to your base station: the rest is done over real, physical connections."
Despite the clean, hi-tech image of the online world, much of the planet remains totally reliant on real-world connections put in place through massive physical effort. The expensive fiber optic cables are laid at great cost in huge lines around the globe, directing traffic backwards and forwards across continents and streaming millions of conversations simultaneously from one country to another.
One expert suggested that this week's accident should be a "wake-up call" to convince governments that keeping such connections secure should be a higher priority. Officials must spend more time and energy making sure that critical communications such as mobile phones and the net are adequately protected - whether from disaster or a terrorist strike, said Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism at the Gulf Research Centre in Dubai.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack," he said. "When it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Although the direct effect of the Mediterranean accident is being felt as far west as Bangladesh, the greatest impact has been in India, which has the world's fifth largest internet population and an economy that is increasingly reliant on hi-tech communications. The Indian stock markets had already closed when reports of the collapse first surfaced on Wednesday, but the impact of a 50% drop in bandwidth was being felt keenly yesterday - particularly by the country's expansive outsourcing industry.
American corporations were reporting a number of problems with their Indian-based support services and call centers as the domino effect kicked in, although a spokesman for BT - one of Britain's biggest outsourcers - said the company had so far seen little direct evidence of problems. Countries in east Asia and the Pacific remained unaffected as they pipe most of their internet traffic to Europe through the US, but it could be several weeks before things are back to normal in the affected countries.
"It will depend on how bad the damage is, but they'll find the sections in question and bring them up onto a ship for repair before sinking them again," said Mauldin. "It could take a week or possibly two weeks."
The fiber optic wires in question - called Flag Europe-Asia and Sea-Me-We 4 - are some of the most vital information pipelines between Europe and the east. The latter, which runs in an uninterrupted line from western Europe to Singapore, had only recently been opened after a mammoth £500m, three-year installation project. Between them, the two lines are responsible for around 75% of all connectivity in the Middle East and south Asia.
"The problems are really at pinch points where increasingly huge amounts of information are coming through," said Jim Kinsella, chairman of Interoute, Europe's largest fiber optic network provider. He said that improvements are scheduled for submarine cabling, but that plans to send more internet traffic over land connections rather than under the sea had been set back by political wrangling.
"The whole subsea franchise operation is due to change dramatically in the next 18 months, but the question is how we cope in the meantime. You always have to assume that this kind of thing is going to happen."
By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2008
Published: 1/31/2008
And Now
New cable cut compounds net woes
A submarine cable in the Middle East has been snapped, adding to global net problems caused by breaks in two lines under the Mediterranean on Wednesday.
The Falcon cable, owned by a firm that operates one of the previously damaged cables, was snapped on Friday morning.
The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom.
Following the earlier break internet services were severely disrupted in Egypt, the Middle East and India.
"The situation is critical for us in terms of congestion," Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai's ISP DU, told The Associated Press, following the most recent break.
Wednesday's incident caused disruption to 70% of the nationwide internet network in Egypt on Wednesday, while India suffered up to 60% disruption.
Flag Telecom said a repair ship was expected to arrive at the site of the first break - 8.3km from Alexandria in Egypt - on 5 February, with repair work expected to take a week.
A repair ship deployed to the second break - 56km from Dubai - was expected to arrive at the site in the "next few days", the firm said.
Web returns
The first cable - the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) - was cut at 0800 on 30 January, the firm said. A second cable thought to lie alongside it - SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable - was also split.
FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East.
SEA-ME-WE 4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
The two cable cuts meant that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older Sea-M-We 3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.
The firm said the cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the stretch of network between India and Europe by 75% percent.
As a result, carriers in Egypt and the Middle East re-routed their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.
The cause of the break has still not been confirmed. The third break is unlikely to disrupt commerce in the region as many business are closed on Fridays.
Initial reports suggested that it could have been snapped by a ship's anchor.
Internet service providers said they expected India's to be back to about 80% of its usual speed by the end of Friday.
In Egypt Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said he expected to be at the same capacity within two days.
"However, it's not before ten days until the internet service returns to its normal performance," Kamil told the state Al-Ahram newspaper.
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