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Tuesday, February 05, 2008 Analyzing the Internet CollapseContinued from page 2 By John Borland
"We have planned for circumstances like these," says Nathan Linkon, a spokesman for Infosys, a large Bangalore-based outsourcing company. "We have diversity in path and providers, and we haven't lost any connectivity to our offices or customers." With just two cables at issue, restoring service is expected to go more smoothly than did the 49-day process required after the Taiwan earthquake. Flag Telecom has told its customers that a repair ship that launched from Catania, Italy, will arrive and begin work today. The company said that Egyptian authorities are "expediting the permits" so that work can begin as soon as the ship arrives. These repair operations have become fairly routine, with marine service companies on call around the world to launch a ship as quickly as possible when a nearby cable has been torn by a ship's anchor or fishing net, or, more unusually, by a natural event such as an earthquake. A repair ship will typically take several days to reach the site of a break, says Stephen Scott, commercial manager for the U.K.-based Global Marine Systems, which is not involved in fixing this week's break. A ship will locate the break in the line, sometimes by using a remote-controlled submarine device that can send signals up and down the cable, Scott says. The cable is then cut entirely at the break, and the little sub brings one half to the surface. Alternately, some operations simply use long grappling hooks to grab the cable. Once the first half is brought to the surface, the crew splices on a long segment of replacement cable. The first half is let back to the sea floor; the other broken half is brought to the top, and the other end of the replacement cable is spliced on. Unless the seas are rough, this double-splicing operation can take about 20 hours from start to finish, Scott says. In the wake of the fiber breaks, Perhar says that his organization is encouraging ISPs and companies dependent on fast connections to continue diversifying their bandwidth sources as much as possible, and to lobby for new cable to be laid. Telegeography Research counts at least four new fiber lines planned for the Europe-Egypt route over the next few years, including another by Flag Telecom, one by Telecom Egypt, another by the Egypt-based Orascom Telecom, and a fourth funded by the India-Middle East-Western Europe consortium of companies. But even these will all use roughly the same route, says analyst Strong. That will keep this Mediterranean zone a "choke point" worth watching. "With more cables, it's getting better over time," Strong says. "But there will still be a lack of physical, geographical redundancy. That is something of a concern." |
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The State of the Global Telecosm
04/22/2008
Comments
jwoodside on 02/05/2008 at 6:10 AM
5
KA9Q on 02/07/2008 at 3:41 AM
2
How well they actually do all this stuff is another question.
jwoodside on 02/07/2008 at 6:25 AM
5
olmon on 02/05/2008 at 10:18 AM
6
kapitan on 02/05/2008 at 11:11 AM
1
jfreitag on 02/05/2008 at 5:04 PM
1
gabrielg01 on 02/06/2008 at 12:45 PM
294
Some people would say that these cable accidents were no accidents at all. Maybe some people have an interest to have communications shift towards satellites. Iran suffered the most outage from these cable cuts, and given all the war rhetoric going around...it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots.
KA9Q on 02/07/2008 at 3:49 AM
2
Satellites also have their own failure mechanisms. The radio links can be jammed. Earth stations and satellites can both fail, and the latter are hard to repair. They also run out of stationkeeping fuel or just plain wear out and have to be periodically replaced.
orgnet on 02/05/2008 at 10:58 AM
2
martinaatayo on 02/05/2008 at 5:09 PM
30
as opposed to fiber lines.
As understandable as bandwith accomodation supports existing fiber application, material alteration,especially in satellite composition and design, could overcome any existing disadvantages, on the reasonableness
that, both risk and economic advantages support
wireless internet investment and eliminates any
long term failures, typical of the one in discussion.
Total wireless internet, replacing landline connection, is a dream that seems most
certain than probable.(martin@mpgatechnology.com)
harishh@hotmail.com on 02/05/2008 at 7:30 PM
1
smithsomian on 02/08/2008 at 2:51 AM
18
That is unless you've found a way to increase the speed of light. Current roundtrip latency from earth to satellites and back is almost 1000 milliseconds.
Imagine your ping times. That would all but destroy telephone/VOIP communications, online gaming, etc. Not to mention the incredibly reduced throughput because of the chatty nature of TCP.
gayathriherath on 04/04/2008 at 11:11 AM
1
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