Broken cables hinder Internet connections
Internet connectivity provided a rare glimpse of its fragility Thursday as two undersea cables were broken on the other side of the planet, reducing service between Europe and the Middle East.
The disruptions underscored how dependent people have become on Internet connections and how closely different regions are now tied.
“Anything that interrupts international connections is a big deal,” said Tom Weekland, a managing partner at the Chicago-based Diamond Management and Technology consultancy. “Hospitals get imaging diagnostics from Asian radiologists. Even small companies have payrolls prepared in India. If connections are broken, or even degraded, it impacts business here.”
The backbone of high-speed interconnectivity is optical fiber, especially large cables buried under the sea. While cables are often broken, especially by fishing trawlers, the latest incident was unusual because two giant cables were snapped at the same time about 12 miles off the coast of Egypt, evidently by a ship dragging its anchor in rough seas.
“Having two cables go at once is unusual,” said Stephan Beckert, a researcher at Telegeography, a Washington-based research firm specializing in international networks. “About 75 percent of the capacity between Europe and the Middle East was severed.”
Phone companies around the world scurried to reroute network connections and looked ahead a few years to when cables now under construction will make global communication networks far more redundant.
Two new cables are slated for the Mediterranean where Thursday’s outage occurred, and another two cables are being laid under the Pacific Ocean from the U.S. to Asia. One is due to operate by August when the Olympics open in Beijing.
“Ten years from now, the impact of any outage will be far greater than today,” said Weekland, “but by then, the redundancy should render such outages far less likely.”
In the Middle East and Asia, several locations had no Internet service, while others found their connections running slow. Because most U.S. customers are connected to India by cables that run under the Pacific Ocean, disruptions to American businesses caused by the Egyptian cable breaks were minimal, said Beckert.
In fact, carriers serving European customers spent Thursday seeking capacity to route traffic across the Atlantic from Europe so that it could travel across the U.S. and use Pacific undersea cables to reach Asia.
“Some data connections were rerouted automatically, but others required us to buy more capacity,” said Linda Laughlin, a spokeswoman from Verizon Communications Inc., which has customers in 150 countries.
“We had service backup for some customers in a few hours, but for others it takes two or three days,” she said. “With cables cut, our other paths get congested.”
New cables to the Middle East and crossing the Pacific will ease such problems in the future, she said.