Must be an Israeli Submarine -- Internet cable cut 3rd time
Jason P
(CNN) -- An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was cut off the Persian
Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday, the third loss of a line
carrying Internet and telephone traffic in three days.
Ships have been dispatched to repair two undersea cables damaged on
Wednesday off Egypt.
FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables, said repairs were expected to be
completed by February 12. France Telecom, part owner of the other cable,
said it was uncertain when repairs on it would be repaired.
Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that
consults on global Internet issues, said the cables off Egypt were likely
damaged by ships' anchors.
The loss of the two Mediterranean cables -- FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia
cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen
telecommunications companies -- has snarled Internet and phone traffic from
Egypt to India.
Officials said Friday it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's FALCON
cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. A repair ship was en route, FLAG said.
Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the FALCON cable
is designed on a "ring system," taking it on a circuit around the Persian
Gulf and enabling traffic to be more easily routed around damage.
Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday collectively account for as
much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe
and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.
Without the use of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, some carriers
were forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, which could
cause delays, Beckert said.
Other carriers could use SeaMeWe-3, an older cable that remained the only
direct connection from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Because this
cable is older, it has a smaller capacity than the two damaged cables,
Beckert said.
Still, Beckert stressed that although the problem created a "big pain" for
many of carriers, it did not compare to the several months of disruption in
East Asia in 2006 after an earthquake damaged seven undersea cables near
Taiwan.
TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin said new cables planned to link
Europe with Egypt should provide enough backup to prevent most similar
problems in the future.
Schoonover said a similar Internet problem could not happen in the United
States.
"We have all the content here," he said. "It's not going to be felt other
than we won't get the BBC."
TeleGeography officials also said most traffic between the U.S., Canada and
Mexico is carried over land, and there is a plentiful supply of undersea
cables carrying traffic under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Meanwhile, Internet service was slow Friday in Dubai and Egypt, where online
service was intermittent, but there was less demand because many businesses
in those countries aren't open on Fridays.
Service providers in Egypt said they hoped to have improved capacity by
Sunday.
Web surfers in India were experiencing a marked improvement in service,
though graphic- or video-heavy sites were still taking longer to load.
Most of the major Internet service providers in India, like Reliance and
VSNL, were starting to use backup lines Friday, allowing service to slowly
come back, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Services Providers
Association of India.
The Indian ISPs were still alerting customers to slowdowns over the next few
days with service quality delays of 50 percent to 60 percent, he said.
The Internet slowdowns had no effect on trading at the country's two main
stock exchanges, the SENSEX and the NSE, because they aren't dependent on
the downed cables, Chharia said.
Individual Web users were still feeling the effects.
Madhu Vohra, who lives in the city of Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, said
she uses Internet phone service Skype to call her son in the United States,
but she hasn't been able to reach him since the slowdown.
"We keep trying for a long time and the message comes up, 'This page can't
display,' so finally we just turn the computer off and give up," Vohra said.
Internet cafes typically full of teenaged gamers are nearly empty with
speeds still frustratingly slow.
"I felt like beating the ... modem, throwing it away, because we compete on
the Internet and it feels really bad," said Aman Khurana, 13.
State-owned Dubai telecom provider Du and Kuwait's Ministry of
Communications estimated Thursday that the problems might take two weeks to
fix.
-- © 2008 Cable News Network