Five Undersea Global Internet Cables Cut in the Last Week

Cable damage hits 1.7m Internet users in UAE
By Asma Ali Zain (Our staff reporter)

5 February 2008




DUBAI ?- An estimated 1.7 million Internet users in the UAE have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said yesterday, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site.


Internet data was majorly affected as it is the biggest capacity carried by the undersea cables.

However, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected.

Two du experts yesterday briefed the media on the current methods being undertaken by the telecom provider to re-route the Internet traffic to provide normalcy to the users.

Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, "The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia."

A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each.

These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

The first cut in the undersea Internet cable occurred on January 23, in the Flag Telcoms FALCON submarine cable which was not reported. This has not been repaired yet and the cause remains unknown, explained Jaishanker.

A major cut affecting the UAE occurred on January 30 in the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4). "This was followed by another cut on February 1 which was on the same cable (FALCON). This affected the du network majorly as connections from the Gulf were severed while there was limited connectivity within the region," said Khaled Tabbara, executive director, Carrier Relations, du.

He explained that the network was re-routed through Al Khobar in Saudi Arabia and was near normal now.

Almost 90 per cent of Internet traffic is routed through undersea cables and only 10 per cent is done through the satellite.

The experts also suggested that the cause of damage could have been a ship's anchor that was dragging due to inclement weather conditions in the region during that particular period. "About 60-80 per cent of damages to undersea cable are due to external factors and only 10 per cent on an average can be classified as component failure," said Tabbara.

A fourth undersea cable that carries Internet connectivity to and from the Middle East has been cut, according to various reports. The previous three cuts caused major disruptions to Internet service in the region and in some cases led to complete Internet blackouts.

This latest cable is operated by Qatar Telecom, and the disruption affected mainly that part of the United Arab Emirates, the federation of seven states situated in the southeast of the Arabian Peninsula. While this latest cut didn't cause a complete disruption of service to Qatar, the prior cable failures caused major Internet blackouts in several Arab states in the Persian Gulf region.

According to reports, the latest disruption was caused by a power failure and not by a ship's anchor slicing the physical cable, as has been suspected in the other three major disruptions. These same reports hint at the suspicion that the cuts have been intentional but, so far, there has been no confirmed report that these disruptions are the result of an organized effort.

Internet cable cuts: More than accidents?
February 6, 2008

By MIKE WENDLAND

Free Press Technology Columnist

There's a growing uneasiness in the global Internet community over a series of crippling Internet blackouts overseas that has resulted from four cuts and disruptions to underwater cables over the past week. While no evidence of sabotage has been forthcoming, the four breaks seem to many observers to stretch the bounds of coincidence.

The cable breaks have been causing a growing buzz on tech blogs and drawing attention from conspiracy theorists, who suspect everything from information warfare to terrorism to sabotage by the United States to take out Internet connections to Iran, whose connectivity indeed has been pretty much blacked out for most of the past week.

The breaks have been in the Middle East and Asia and have caused widespread disruptions, especially in India. They've had little to no effect in the United States, except for users trying to communicate with people in the affected areas. Most of the huge tech firms in India that do outsourced programming and data entry for U.S. and European insurance, banking and medical companies have not been seriously disrupted because they have used alternate land- or satellite-based private connections.

Dragging ship anchors caused by rough waters in the eastern Mediterranean were the initial suspicion, but Egyptian authorities repairing some of the breaks today said they have reviewed onshore cameras of the cable locations and could see no maritime traffic in the area when the breaks occurred.

Two of the severed lines are owned by the India-based FLAG company that has assembled a team of 30, including telecommunication engineers and Egyptian government and Navy officials. They're working on a repair ship at the FLAG Europe-Asia site off the coastal city of Alexandria.

Those breaks have affected more than 85 million Internet users in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Egyptian officials say those breaks may not be fixed until the weekend. Meanwhile, a crew of 50 off the coast of Dubai says it will take them about a week to repair a damaged fiber optic.