RE: What those oceanic cable cuts mean to you

Consumer "Sonar" is more sophisticated now than Navy Sonar was in the 70s.

I don't think it would be too hard to find a cable in a few hundred feet of water near shore. These cable were cut in areas where it is shallow enough for ships to anchor.

Cutting a cable by dragging something sharp across it would be a lot easier than trying to keep it operational and dry under water while you splice in a tap.

To find the shore end, just look for the signs that say "Don't anchor in this area".

Maybe terrorists aren't the problem...

June 1st, 2007 -

"Maritime thieves have stolen at least 11-kilometres Vietnamese portion of Thailand bound SEA-ME-WE3 submarine cable and sold the 100 tons of illicit cargo as scrap..."

http://www.lirneasia.net/2007/06/vietnams-submarine-cable-lost-and-found/

I have worked at THREE Gateway stations,
and I would like to see someone "attack" the beachhead under all that concrete and stone plus the expansion tension vault. Its down underground fairly deep. The guys outside one of the TAT-like stations in Nova Scotia are aware of Beach side activity and there are surveilance cams pointed *everywhere*. The Beach-head is also a nice Lunch break place to eat the sandwich and watch gulls compete for crumbs.

Yes, we are vunerable and
Yes, the Gateways and International Carriers are a single point of failure contact,
but stuff like this does NOT happen often,
hysteria and media coverage aside.

Don not worry; there are (some) alternatives. There are reciprocal arrangements. There is some redundancy. Fool me ONCE rule here; the (legitimate long haul) Carriers are fairly quick to implement redundancy after a "learning experience" because of the vast revenue losses due to outage.

I started at a time when T4 and T5 Transmission were the typical HighTech TransOceanic crossing, but the new Fiber and sheaths/outer skin technology is really amazing, far beyond anything back in the 1970's.

I bet a cable ship is already dragging the pickup hook (yup, I know this takes Time+Money), or the alternate plan is kicking in. I recall a small Canadian Carrier went BIGTIME during a LOS-outage because they had spare leased channels on a Sat-Gateway, which they sublet to the major International.That Major I-Carrier is out of business, and the little Carrier Company has replaced it.

I know the effects of something like this are felt globally

Often , Network World articles only highlight the short term effects, and neglect mention of the longer term plan

Hi all,

Here's a great site that shows what the cable cuts did and did not actually affect.

Check it out:

https://confluence.slac.stanford.edu/display/IEPM/Effects+of+Fibre+Outage+through+Mediterranean

I dont know, how it affects reliance.
I had to go for another broadband connection, as my current broadband connection became slow due to cable cut.