Third Undersea Internet Cable Damaged in Mideast

[Soldier4Christ]

Third Undersea Internet Cable Damaged in Mideast

1st Cable Cut - “What’s the back up plan?”

2nd Cable Cut - “What’s going on here?”

3rd Cable Cut - “What are the odds of this being a simple coincidence?”

No Ships Were Present When Cable Cut

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East’s internet traffic were severed, Egypt’s Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.

The ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor on the two key cables was most likely responsible for Wednesday’s cut in service that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of most of their internet connections.

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,” said the statement.

The ministry added that the location, 5 miles from the port of Alexandria, was in a restricted area so ships would not have been allowed there to begin with.

Internet connectivity in Egypt had now reached 70-80 per cent of its previous rate due to rerouted connections through alternate cables in the Far East and to Italy, added the statement.

Two ships have sailed from France and Italy at the request of cable owners Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG) and the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) and will begin repairs which are expected to take several days.

The ministry estimated that full service in Egypt would not be restored for another ten days.

Original Story

A third undersea Internet cable has been damaged in the Middle East, adding to the disruption in online services after two other lines were cut earlier this week, the cable operating firm said.

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner, FLAG Telecom, which is part of India’s Reliance Communications.

The repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the company said on its website.

Flag Telecom owns another cable that was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday. A repair ship was expected to arrive by Tuesday to restore that cable and repairs were expected to take a week, the company said.

The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.

[ibTina]

Something sure smells "fishy" to me!!!   

[Soldier4Christ]

4th Undersea Cable Break: Between Qatar and UAE
   
   Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, ensuring continuing loss of Internet in the region

In the 4th undersea telecommunications cable to lose connectivity within 3 days across the Middle East, Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted, ensuring ongoing loss of communications across the Middle East from Egypt to India, with the exceptions of US-occupied Iraq, Isratine, Lebanon and Iran.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) island of Das on Friday.

The cause of damage is not yet clear, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, the implausible theory touted by European and American media networks.

Physical breaks to undersea communications cables take at the very least several days and on occasion weeks to repair, due to the technical difficulties involved and requirement of specialized cable ships to reach the scene. Weather, logistics and locations affect the time required to effect a repair.

However damage can be mitigated as in the case of Qatar by finding alternative routes for transmission, where available, and Qatar has so far managed to keep internet capacity at around 60% after taking such measures.

Telecommunications and internet services have been affected in other Gulf countries, UAE's Etisalat is expected to release a statement on Monday.

Much of the Middle East and West Asia, including the Gulf Arab region, Egypt, Sri Lanka and West India were plunged into a virtual internet blackout since Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt's north coast, supplying communications to Europe and North America.

The initial breaches were in segments of two intercontinental cables known as Sea-ME-We-4 and Flag Europe-Asia, run by British company FLAG telecom.

The situation was made worse on Friday when FLAG and India's Reliance Communications, revealed that a third cable belonging to FLAG - Falcon had been damaged off the UAE coast, located 56 kilometres from Dubai on a segment between the UAE and Oman.

UAE's Etisalat telecommunications and Internet Service Provider company said it does not use the Falcon cable and is therefore unaffected. The UAE's second telco, Du, uses this cable and has warned the damage could hamper its efforts to restore normal service to customers. Etisalat said it is cooperating with Du to help minimise disruption.

FLAG said a repair ship was expected to arrive at the location of this third damaged cable within "the next few days", but that bad weather had delayed the vessel from setting off from Abu Dhabi port in the UAE.

The ship is now expected to depart on Monday morning and the repairs should take five days.

Etisalat said it had been informed by the British FLAG Telecom company, which also operates the damaged cables in the Mediterranean Sea, that the problem should be fixed in two weeks time on one of those cables, while another cable operator has plans to carry out repairs to the second cable of the Egyptian coast on February 8.

FLAG said on Saturday a ship should reach the cable repair ground by February 5.

The United States has specialist navy training and submarines precisely trained and geared to the cutting of cables and communication. International communications as well as the Internet has several bottle-necks where the break of a single cable or communications node can render countries and even regions of the world vulnerable while being heavily dependent upon a handful of companies for most of their international telecommunications.

Mustafa Alani, head of security and terrorism department at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" for governments and professionals to divert more resources to protect vital infrastructure. "This shows how easy it would be to attack" communications networks, he said.

The Israeli press has remained silent on the cuts, in spite of the news worthiness of it's Arab neighbours losing communications whilst its own remain intact, and Israeli leaders have stepped-up their unending war of words being directed at Iran. Zionist Prime Minister Olmert used the celebration of "Holocaust Day" to announce once again that Israel was ready to act against Iran on its own.

Contrary to earlier reports, Iran has not been cut off Internet nor communications and the Iranian press have not mentioned any communication problems within Iran. Iran has the highest number of Internet users in the Middle East with around 20 million Iranians online, although mostly using Persian language only, and comes in 5th place in the Middle East for percentage of population online.

The cost of the loss of communications to the region have yet to be estimated.

[Shammu]

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

8 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.

Cable damage hits 1.7m Internet users in UAE

[Rhys]

http://www.business-standard.com/common/news_article.php?leftnm=lmnu9&subLeft=2&autono=313 112&tab=r
5th cable cut fuels allegations of isolating Iran
The reason for the damage to the cables remains moot as the companies have claimed that they were cut after ships weighed their anchors over them. However, the Egyptian ministry (after monitoring the satellite surveillance pictures) had refuted these claims stating there were no ships in the vicinity 12 hours before and after the cable cut.

http://www.scandoil.com/moxie-bm2/financial/politics_/bennex-rov-stolen.shtml


Bennex ROV Stolen

Published Mar 2, 2004



Bennex Transmark Norge of Bergen, Norway, reports that some time during the recent weekend a remote operated vehicle (ROV) was stolen from the company’s site in Nordre Toobodkai. The 1.2-metre long, 500 kilogram ROV is of no use to anyone not having the necessary control system and software that is needed for the unit to function.

I expect in four years someone could have duplicated the control system and software.

Suez Canal Transit Guide: http://www.emco-shipping.com/suez_canal.html



Average transit time is 14 hours.

[Soldier4Christ]

It was discovered that a 5.5 ton abandoned anchor is the cause of one of the cables being cut. It is not known yet what is the cause of the others being cut. I wouldn't doubt the ROV may have been involved in this. The Iran isolation theory though I think is bogus and the result of propaganda attempting to escalate things between Iran and the rest of the world. These cables being cut has affected others besides Iran.