News
EDITORIAL: Watching the web [Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas]
Mar. 8, 2008--More than 95 percent of all transoceanic telephone and Internet communications flow at the speed of light through several hundred thousand miles of privately owned submarine cable that's only about the width of a finger.
The phrase "technological marvel" barely describes this web of human genius on which the world increasingly relies for globalized commerce, government and personal use. Yet as sophisticated as the web and the Internet are, recent events exposed a chilling vulnerability and a glance at the chaos that could ensue if and when they fail.
On Jan. 30, two cables were mysteriously cut (by a ship's anchor, authorities contend) in what was supposed to be a restricted, ship-free area in the Mediterranean Sea north of Alexandria, Egypt, disrupting Internet and telephone service across the Middle East and India.
Cairo spent a day without Internet service. One mobile phone company executive in Egypt described the problem to the news site Bloomberg.com as "a national disaster."
On Feb. 1, a Persian Gulf cable that runs through the Suez to Sri Lanka was either cut or knocked out by power failure, adding to the communications misery in the region. Within hours, a fourth cable, linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates via the islands of Haloul and Das, was either cut or knocked out by power failure.
While the submarine cable industry and authorities were deflecting conspiracy speculation, most of the world lost access to YouTube for several hours on Feb. 24 when Pakistan's government ordered the country's 70 Internet service providers to block access to anti-Islamic movies on that site. A programming misstep affected two-thirds of the global Internet population, The Associated Press reported.
Of that mess, Todd Underwood of Renesys Corp., a New Hampshire firm that monitors Internet pathways, told the AP: "To be honest, there's not a single thing preventing this from happening to E-Trade or Bank of America or the FBI."
Of the mysterious severed-cable problems in the Mideast, Col. R.S. Parihar, secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, told the International Herald Tribune: "This has been an eye-opener for us and everyone in the telecom industry worldwide. These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables."
Much is at stake. One example from the commercial constellation of operators involves Verizon Business, which operates a global IP network that covers 485,000 route miles and serves more than 2,700 cities in 150 countries.
The submarine cable system is far from built out and continues to expand as world communications rely more and more on that system. The more robust the system, the better it can reroute traffic around breaks. But concerns such as those raised by Parihar and Underwood of Renesys deserve immediate, high-priority consideration.
Currently, monitoring of the submarine network falls to several tracking organizations and the International Cable Protection Committee, an 86-member coalition of private interests in nearly 50 countries that works closely with offshore industries that utilize the seabed for purposes ranging from offshore drilling to fishing.
That's all good, but are there enough eyes on the network? It would seem not. Is it time for help from the military? Perhaps.
One thing's for sure: The submarine cable system must be given every possible security resource. We hope we never find out that the private sector wasn't up to that challenge.
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Copyright (c) 2008, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Cable operators announced the start off of repair works at two of the three broken undersea cables that were disrupted last week outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria, causing Internet access problems throughout Middle East and India. The repair works will take at least a week to be completed, according to Flag Telecom, one of the firms responsible for the cable.
The cause of the disruption remains unknown, as cable operators are working on restoring the Internet connections as soon as possible. According to several reports, India has lost 60% of its bandwidth, and according to Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association, things aren’t expected to return to normal for the next 10 days.
The investigations continue, but more information is to be expected as soon as all the repairing crews will reach the broken cables. One of the theories was that a tanker might have dragged its anchor on the sea bed, but the Egyptian communication ministry said no ships were reported in the area at the time of the disruption.
Not all cables have been damaged simultaneously. On January 30, Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable and SEA-ME-WE-4 cable were disrupted outside the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, and two day later, on February 1st, the Falcon cable, also owned by Flag Telecom, was damaged 56 km from Dubai. Consequently one question appears: Could this be a simple coincidence?
The impact in countries around the Gulf Region and South Asia had been minimized through redirecting communication services to new routes, but it is certain that Internet connection haven’t exactly been the best following the unfortunate incident. Egypt for example lost 70% of its Internet capacity and will continue to face this problem within the next week and a half.
The repair teams have been delayed by bad weather conditions on the Egyptian and Dubai coasts. At the same time, conspiracy theories have appeared, according to which the ‘perfect timing’ was simply too perfect to be a coincidence, and this whole thing could be an attempt to deprive some Islamic countries of Internet access. More details on the exact causes of the disruption are to be expected within the next week.
