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1. Neocon News » Fourth internet cable cut in the Middle East.
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1. #236492
   On February 5th, 2008 at 4:57 pm, graysonret said:

   Sounds “fishy” to me (pun intended). Makes you wonder if someone (people) are cutting them deliberately, especially in that area of the world. I also wonder how secure we are.

2. #236498
   On February 5th, 2008 at 4:59 pm, zorro said:

   Hmmmm is right. My instinct says mischief not Mother Nature.

   Time will tell but Iran, Russia and China top my list of suspects…

3. #236500
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:00 pm, josetheguerilla said:

   Hmmmmmmmmmm.

4. #236501
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:01 pm, SHoward said:

   You know, we have had reports of AlQuida having some kind of navy. I wonder if they have any subs…..

5. #236502
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:01 pm, fred5676 said:

   It couldn’t be Al Qaeda – they depend on their web presence and email for communications.

   Maybe a subversive group of fed-up customers sick and tired of a heavily-accented guy named ‘Bill’ trying to help them with computer problems.

6. #236504
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:04 pm, William Amos said:

   I dunno Al qaeda has to hate the news of Iraq surge working from getting out.

   Of course it could be an effort by then to cut off communications before an attack.

7. #236510
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:07 pm, BlameAmericaLast said:

   They need to switch to satellite.

8. #236519
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:14 pm, vickisoup said:

   Does this mean that, when I call Customer Service, I may actually get to speak to someone in the USA, and not in India or the Middle East? Yay!

9. #236530
   On February 5th, 2008 at 5:19 pm, allrsn said:

   It could be intentional, but I have heard the the sea floor does a lot of shifting. If the floor is full of bolders ravines etc. I can also see problems for cables.

   Time will tell I think.

10. #236532
    On February 5th, 2008 at 5:21 pm, CommentGuy said:

    Satellite doesn’t have the bandwidth of cable by factors of a 1000’s or more.

    Cable is fine, what is surprising for these two off Egypt being two of the newest that they were not buried cables that close to shore.

    I could send everyone to a lot of tech sites that discuss world net operation, but there is a whole lot of multi pathing out there and after the first outages reroutes were being accomplished fairly quickly from alternate providers.

    In fact one of the companies involved had a parallel cable running in the same direction and it only involved shifting traffic over to the other cable.

    Both the Egypt breaks have repair ships on the scene and we will soon know what type of damage was done to the cables from the source themselves when they retrieve the cables for repair.

    All else is wild speculation.

    We have three known breaks and another case with a power loss.

    There are many technical faults with the Engadget story , surprising since they are a tech oriented site.

11. #236552
    On February 5th, 2008 at 5:32 pm, CommentGuy said:

    Sounds “fishy” to me (pun intended). Makes you wonder if someone (people) are cutting them deliberately, especially in that area of the world. I also wonder how secure we are.

    There are less than a dozen or cables in that area all heading down the Suez Canal to make the passage to the Indian Ocean.

    We land over 50 or more cables on our east coast shores and another couple of dozen on the west coast.

    We have a lot of redundant paths to work with.

    Right now about 30% of the total installed fiber capacity is not even being used at all and is just there for expansion as net usage grows.

    Also tech advances are doubling the capacity of each fiber in the cable every five years or so.

    Most see this not stopping soon either.

    Today a single fiber can carry nearly the whole world net traffic of 20 years ago for international transit.

    Remember these cables also carry multiple fibers per cable.

12. #236587
    On February 5th, 2008 at 6:12 pm, nyc123me said:

    Four? I guess coincidence is possible, but..

13. #236596
    On February 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm, reine.de.tout said:

    A related article:

    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1202064583974&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

14. #236600
    On February 5th, 2008 at 6:21 pm, see-dubya said:

    Very interesting. Here are a couple of fun speculations that I don’t take very seriously:

    1. Iran now has submarines, or
    2. Someone doing the repairs is going to put a little eavesdropping doodad on all the fiber-optic traffic in and out of the ME.

    Hope it’s us.

15. #236609
    On February 5th, 2008 at 6:28 pm, hadsil said:

    Who benefits?

16. #236611
    On February 5th, 2008 at 6:31 pm, Blind_Mule said:

    fred5676 said:
    Maybe a subversive group of fed-up customers sick and tired of a heavily-accented guy named ‘Bill’ trying to help them with computer problems.

    LMAO, would you like a slurpy with your tech support.

17. #236654
    On February 5th, 2008 at 7:24 pm, AlohaGuy said:

    Does this mean that, when I call Customer Service, I may actually get to speak to someone in the USA, and not in India or the Middle East? Yay!

    Only if you press 2 for Espanol…

18. #236657
    On February 5th, 2008 at 7:25 pm, JoAnn in VA said:

    Scarey thought, but it kind of makes sense to preactice cutting local cables and training say, 4 different groups on how to do so effectively before doing a bigger run on a foreign target whose communications you want to really disrupt. Or am I just being a little too paranoid?

19. #236769
    On February 5th, 2008 at 9:57 pm, Sanddog said:

    When I was in the Navy, cut subcables were a regular occurrence. The only thing that surprised me about this is that it made the news.

20. #236835
    On February 5th, 2008 at 11:09 pm, radio relay said:

    That was my thought, too, Sanddog.

    I worked in the network control center for IBM Global Services a few years back, and multiple, simultaneous cable cuts were not unusual… never made the news either… guess they didn’t realize it was a mole hill they could turn into a mountain.

21. #237088
    On February 6th, 2008 at 8:24 am, DaveC said:

    I know.. it’s ‘Cloverfield, part II; Cairo’

22. #237274
    On February 6th, 2008 at 11:37 am, CMD said:

    I haven’t seen any news stories highlight this yet, but it appears these cable disruptions have entirely severed Tehran’s trunkline connections to the outside world.

    http://www.internettrafficreport.com/asia.htm

23. #237827
    On February 6th, 2008 at 6:31 pm, procopy said:

    Five?
    http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/theuae/2008/February/theuae_February155.xml&section=theuae

24. #238445
    On February 7th, 2008 at 12:13 pm, GaijinBob said:

    DaveC said:
    

    I know.. it’s ‘Cloverfield, part II; Cairo’

    Do kaiju count as part of nature?