Third undersea Internet cable cut in Mideast
Interestingly, it appears that Iran’s traffic has been severely impacted (i.e., cut to zero).
So, is this just coincidental? Or is someone (the U.S. military or the IDF comes to the top of my list) trying to hamper communications in advance of some military action?
I half wonder if there isn’t some non-anchor explanation. I am rather dubious that a country would go to THAT much trouble to knock out internet for… a week?
I’m waiting to hear of some natural cause that wasn’t foreseen or detected. Three lines all by boat anchor stretches credibility.
It’s not only Iran that’s been affected. Everyone from Egypt to India. I would not jump to conclusions (although no doubt some people will).
This same thing happened to us 5 1/2 years ago. A cable was cut undersea somewhere near South Korea. The entire region was down for a week.
Maybe someone is knocking them down so that they can install wiretaps without being detected?
I really don’t expect Bush to take military action against Iran for the remainder of his term. I was worried about it, but I think he finally understands he’s shot his bolt.
Hhmmmm…the Web is viewed as a source of Western Cultural Contamination" by some radicals in the M.E., or so I’ve inferred by various SDMB Threads.
Wednesday was the worst for us - most people I know had zero email access that day, with very few other websites opening. Most people weren’t aware of the reason till much later in the evening, which made it even more frustrating.
By Thursday, most ISPs had made alternate arrangements for net traffic - I still couldn’t access any email, but more websites were working. Access speeds were reminiscent of the dial-up days!
By Thursday night, everything was back to normal.
Conspiracy theory…GO!
I do admit that the “three anchors, three cables, three days” official story is improbable and should be questioned, though.
one wonders as there hasnt been anything in the news lately about irans nuclear intentions. calm before the storm?
Or an organization using this as a very large horse head in the bed to extort protection monies from major industries reliant on internet communications … these outages affected not just India to Egypt but also many international interests that farm information to those regions.
Yes it sounds like a Bond plot line but agreed that 3 in 3 days stretches credulity.
My understanding is that tapping a fiber optic cable is almost impossible. Still, anyone who figures out a way to shut down communications to the ME could make a fortune in the stock markets!
Before we say that it stretches credibility, won’t we first need to know what the typical rate at which these things are damaged is? Can anyone provide a reliable cite on such information before we say that it’s necessarily intentional?
3 is still small statistics to me.
A quick perusal of “undersea cable” lifetime on the internets, suggests that 25 years is a typical design life. Breaks happen at the rate of a few a year worldwide, mostly due to earthquakes.
I don’t see any appropriately placed earthquakes in the Mediterranean or Persian gulf over the past week.
Easily explained using the magic anchor theory.
It could also be a comment misunderstood by a reporter.
“What happened to the cable?”
“Well, gee, I dunno, way down in the water like that. Sometimes a ship anchor can cut them, though.”
How exactly do they repair such a cable, anyway?
My first thought was ‘AQ suddenly got smart!’. I’m not seeing the advantage to the US to cut internet to the entire region (including India)…but I certainly see how a terrorist group could see a BIG advantage in doing something like this, especially as a trial balloon to see what effect it would have.
That said, I seriously doubt that is what happened. I don’t know if it was boat anchors or something else, but I think it was some kind of accident or fuckup. For all we know the cables weren’t cut at all but some other infrastructure related problem at the peering level between long haul ISPs in the region happened (I’ve seen large scale router problems happen before because some bean counter wanted to push something out before it was fully tested).
I assume they will use divers and do FO splices and then re-wrap the cable to prevent the sea from further corroding it. I’ve seen land line cuts anyway and I assume the techniques are similar, except for the whole dive suit and water thingy.
-XT
How Do You Fix an Undersea Cable?
Of course, for all I actually know about the subject, they may be using sharks with lasers on their heads nowadays. 
Cloverfield?
I’m no expert, but I think the idea is that you can’t tap into the signal without breaking the fiber. There’s no electromagnetic field like there would be around a wire. But I assume you could install tapping equipment with either a repeater or a splitter of some sort, to tap into it and still have the signal go through. The problem is that you would have to cut the cable in order to do this, so service would be interrupted and they would know something happened, unless you managed to cut the cable in an “accident” and then you tapped it somewhere else while it was awaiting repairs.
At least that’s the theory people were throwing around on Slashdot.