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| Tuesday, 12 February 2008 | |
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Cables in the Mediterranean and the Middle East may have been severed but don’t worry, it’s not terrorism. Ka-boom!
Nobody knows why or how a number of trunk cables in and around the UAE have been cut in the last couple of weeks. The usual suspects – nasty fish with sharp teeth and nasty ships with trailing anchors – have been put in the frame. Given the region’s current political climate, conspiracy theories aren’t far from the surface, either. These “cable cuts” are weighed down by the strength of coincidence, all the same. As major private cable owner FLAG tells us: • “The cable cut was reported at 0800 GMT on January 30th 2008 around 8.3 Km away from Alexandria cable landing station between Egypt – Italy segment.” • ”The cable cut was reported at 0559 GMT on February 1st 2008 around 56 Km from Dubai, UAE on segment between UAE and Oman”. As many as five undersea cables in the region have been cut in less than two weeks, in the Med or the Gulf, hitting the Indian-owned FLAG system and the SEA-ME-WE consortium cable network linking Europe and Asia via the Middle East. In our Internet-obsessed society, CNN could report on 31 January: “Hi-tech Dubai has been hit hard by an Internet outage apparently caused by a cut undersea cable. Industry experts are blaming damage to two undersea cables but it is not known what caused the damage. Reports say that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Bahrain, Pakistan and India, are all experiencing severe problems. Nations that have been spared the chaos include Israel – whose traffic uses a different route – and Lebanon and Iraq.” Iran, too, has seen access to the Internet curtailed although citizens may not be sufficiently empowered to notice. And for sure CNN won’t be too bothered, not least as this was taken by conspiracy theorists to be a precursor for an illegal invasion of that country by the US. FLAG’s latest reports on its progress in restoring the links are from a bygone age: • “The ship loaded with spares has reached the fault location and has initiated the repair work; it is currently planned that the repairs will be completed by Sunday, February 10th 2008.” • “The ship loaded with spares, marine experts, and optical engineers have reached the site yesterday. The crew has recovered the one end of the cable and cable joining work is in progress. The repair team has observed steady progress and the repair work are expected to be completed by Sunday, February 10th 2008.” The abovementioned “steady progress” presumably involves somebody in a wetsuit finding the other end of the cable. Now there’s an idea These latest outages cause concern on two fronts. These involve security and redundancy. The speed with which some people reached the conclusion that some form of ‘terrorism’ was behind the spate of failures highlighted a dollop of paranoia and the inherent vulnerability of the physical communications and Internet backbone in certain parts of the world. There’s an irony here, of course, in that if terrorists had not previously been thinking of sabotaging sections of the global Internet backbone infrastructure, they are probably considering it now. That’s easier said than done, but it’s a timely reminder of the potential risks in this area. Likewise, these events show that the ‘World Wide Web’ is at its widest on some routes but distinctly thin on others. The series of outages is likely to spur new building to increase capacity and redundancy in the region’s infrastructure. There’s a strong suggestion that this is overdue when compared to optical cable provision on major transoceanic routes. A concerted global effort may now be required to ensure that the required levels of continuity and resilience are reached. Jim Chalmers |
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