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When vital cable links gave way

NEW YORK: The lines that tie the globe together by carrying phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch (1.68 cm) thick and lie on the ocean floor.

The foundation for a connected world seems quite fragile, an impression reinforced this week when a break in two cables in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted communications across West Asia and into India and neighbouring countries.

Yet the network itself is fairly resilient. In fact, cables are broken all the time, usually by fishing lines and ship anchors. tice. It takes a confluence of factors for a cable break to cause an outage.

“Most telecom companies have capacity at multiple systems, so if one goes out, they simply re-route to a different system,” said Stephan Beckert, analyst at the research firm TeleGeography in Washington. “It’s just that in this case, both the main route and the back-up route got cut for a lot of companies.”

The two cables — FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 — were cut on the ocean floor just north of Alexandria, Egypt.

(SEA-ME-WE 4 stands for The South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 cable system.)

By an accident of geography and global politics, Egypt is a choke point in global communications as it touches both the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, which flows into the Indian Ocean.

The slim fibre-optic cables that carry the world’s communications are much like ships, in that they are the cheapest way to carry things over long distances. Pulling cable overland is much more expensive and requires negotiation with landowners and governments.

So fibre-optic cables that go from Europe to India take the sea route via Egypt’s Suez Canal, just as ships do. Another Mediterranean cable makes land not far away, in Israel.

But there is no cable overland from Israel into Jordan and to the Gulf, which could have provided a redundant connection for the Gulf states and India. Going overland would have been more expensive and politically difficult — Israel and Arab countries would have to cooperate. There is also no route that goes through Russia, Iran and Pakistan to India. The terrain is rugged, Pakistan is politically unstable, and India and Pakistan are not on good terms.

With two of the three cables passing through Suez being cut, traffic from West Asia and India intended for Europe was forced to route eastward, around most of the globe.

The main route goes through Japan and the U.S., crossing both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.

According to Mr. Beckert, this is normally the cheap way to go for Indian traffic, since capacity is high. However, the distance means more time is required to reach Europe and get a response. The other route from India to Europe goes over China into Russia and along the Trans-Siberian railroad.

Egypt is not the only choke point in the global network. The ocean just south of Taiwan proved to be one in December 2006, when an earthquake cut seven of eight cables passing through the area, slowing down communications in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia for months.

Another possible vulnerability is the U.S. island of Guam in the Pacific Ocean. It is the spider at the centre of a web cable network from the U.S., Japan, Australia, the Philippines and China.

Both cables that connect the U.S. to Australia and New Zealand run over Hawaii, creating another choke point. These bottlenecks are likely to go away, however, as telecoms build more and more lines. Another U.S.-Australia line is scheduled to be completed soon. — AP

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