Posted on 02/09/2008 8:52:55 PM PST by shield
“This is the biggest news story of the week, sliding past everyone’s radar.”
You mean sonar...
Lol, aside from that, cables are not the only mode of accessing the internet.
Besides, I think Iran’s mullah’s would have desired this situation... they have been fighting the internet for a long time now. No more news leaks out of Iran...
As for terrorists... well the telephone is always there, and so are crypted messages.
And one interesting tid-bit: Over 50 submarine cables snapped in the Atlantic during 2006-07 (Engadget.com).
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Only our navy and Israel’s has subs that could have cut the cables. Is this a prelude to an attack by either us or Israel on Iran, or is it a big time intimidation shot across Iran’s bow? It’s not clear - but it is clear that’s it’s one or the other, and either way, there are a lot of very nervous mullahs in Tehran right now.
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The first fault will be repaired within days. This theory only has a short time left if it is valid based on where these faults are.
Israel has the subs, diesel-electrics sold to them by Germany if I remember correctly. If these faults are a signal from someone, they are an ambiguous signal because a lot of cable users other than Iran were affected as well. I will believe it is a “signal” directed at Iran when the damage is more focused on them alone.
Had been posted earlier, but still...
When news broke Jan. 31 that an undersea fiber-optic cable owned by India's Reliance Communications had been accidentally sliced by a ship's anchor in Egypt, people feared a possible replay of 2006. That's when an earthquake in Taiwan disrupted Internet traffic in East Asia for nearly two weeks. India, where the Internet is the lifeblood of the outsourcing industry, was considered particularly vulnerable.
Happily for Reliance (which did not respond to phone calls), and for Indian outsourcing giants Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) , Infosys (INFY), Wipro (WIT), and Satyam Computer Services, which use such undersea fiber-optic cables, no serious problems occurred. Neither, it appears, have the global operations of multinational tech players like IBM (IBM) skipped a beat. True, some of India's Internet cafes saw connection speeds slow dramatically, so the time needed to connect to Google increased 60 times—from two seconds to two minutes—but overall the economic impact of the accident has proven minimal for India.
It could have been much, much worse. According to the Internet Service Providers Assn. of India, nearly half of the 25 gigabits of bandwidth India uses relies on cables, of which 60% snake under the Atlantic Ocean. The rest is routed through the Pacific.
Instead, the disruptions gave India's outsourcers the opportunity to prove to their clients how well they're prepared for such emergencies. As soon as the problem with the Reliance cable became known, traffic was rerouted through the alternative network of cables running under the Pacific Ocean. "There are redundancies built into the system. There are multiple pipes, so if one breaks, others work," says Pradipta Bagchi, a spokesman for Tata Consultancy Services.
Bagchi explains the pecking order for Internet traffic priority. Top of the heap is voice—so that calls to Aunt Mathilda in Missouri or cousin Vijay in Bangalore are unaffected. Then come international private leased lines—networks that banks such as JPMorgan (JPM) or tech service providers such as IBM (IBM), TCS, and Infosys use to connect to clients and their other locations across the world. "These links get high priority and get switched automatically to another line," Bagchi says.
For this privilege, the larger companies pay double or triple the cost to telecom providers such as Reliance, AT&T (ATT) , VSNL, and Bharti Airtel. They also have contracts with multiple providers, so if one fails, the other kicks in. So on Jan. 31, as Reliance announced its problems, rival providers picked up the traffic.
However, smaller back-office outsourcers probably didn't fare as well during the Internet outage. Because these companies compete on price, they are unlikely to be able to afford the kind of contingency plans TCS has with Internet service providers. But even their problems are fairly limited. "Though there is a marginally slower access to Internet, this has not disrupted or affected our operations. Our IT team is working closely with our service providers to ensure that operations continue to function seamlessly," says P.V. Kannan, founder and chief executive of 24/7 Customer, a smaller Bangalore outsourcer.
A day later, says Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Assn. of India, almost 80% of the bandwidth has been restored, as companies made the automatic shift to alternate providers. "The service providers have released more capacity on the Pacific route," he says.
Performance has been a huge problem. Dropped phone calls and interruptions in packet transmissions. They can put a smiley face on it but the pain is real.
Of course and I'm sure you know that a lot of IT work is done in this cross-border, technology-based world.
About your tag line. I heard that the Devil stood up out of respect for the SOB when he entered Hell.
I recall the story that the Russians exhumed LBJ's honorable, decent, warm-hearted, good-natured brother Rasputin (compared to LBJ) and burned his body just to make sure he was dead. I've often wondered if that should be done with LBJ's body.
Iran's paranoid strategic - they would spot changes leading to an attack. If you're right, taking down the cables would give limited time - enough for a surprise attack - that is if they don't have satellite phones... who knows?
Maybe it's the frog in the pot - cut them one at a time and they don't over-react.
Even the rag-tag Taliban have sat-phones.
And what’s to prevent the Iranians from accessing the internet through Russian or Chinese satellites?
Conspiracies are nice, but not always true.
Then again, weren’t the Egyptians concerned over Palestinian license plates and encroachment from Gaza of Palestinians this last week?
Calls to mind a king of the north invading to the south, later finding his rear supply train being threatened from the east and returning to Armageddon....
The fourth break was unsuspicious: the network was taken down by its operator because of a power failure.
Even if all the cables were cut, the Iranian rulers would have found a way if they needed the internet that badly... we are talking about the powers an authoritarian government has, especially with its allies like China and Russia; either of whom would have provided secure internet links through non-traditional means (such as scrambled military radio communication networks hooked up to a Chinese internet line) and the like.
All that cable cuts can do, at most, is hamper civilian communication.
Well, actually any country with armed submarines can “cut” undersea cables. At this point the damage hasn’t been pinpointed publicly.
A torpedo will “cut” a cable quite nicely, thank you.
Actually, Iran has the most to gain from the loss of Internet access.
Mark
On the off-topic subject of LBJ, I’ve been saying for some time that he was the worst domestic policy President of my lifetime, with Carter taking the bow for worst foreign policy President.
That’s an awfully expensive way to accomplish a task easily done much cheaper.
Sure, but the point is that the original post stated that only Israel or the US had the submarines capable of "cutting the cable." I was making the point that any country with armed submarines could do so. Nevermind that surface ships are more than capable of doing so.
Mark
The internet wouldn’t disrupt most military channels, but would slow news and civilian traffic.
If someone takes our Iran’s nukes, it would be nice not to have the green helmet guy’s pictures all over the internet in five minutes.
Nobody wants the Palestinians. They cause problems for any nation who gives them safe haven.
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