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ACE Submarine Cable Cut Impacts Ten Countries
- dschuetz 9y agoInternet down for just 2 days - "Huge African Internet Outage" Still no power in many network blocks in Puerto Rico after months - SNAFU EDIT: Thanks for the title edit! It's more accurate that way.
- RightMillennial 9y agoThis internet outage looks like it affects 22 countries (some more than others) and covers a much more expansive area. I don't mean to detract from the tragedy in Puerto Rico but these events aren't comparable because their causes are completely different.
- dschuetz 9y agoI disagree. No power for months is quite a bit worse than 2 days without the Internet, no matter what the scale or the cause is. 100k people without power is far worse than 100k or 1M without Internet. On the scale of Internet outages, I agree, it's a whopper. Potentially affecting two dozens of African countries even just for 2 days is a big deal. It's still less important than several hundreds of thousands of people not having power for months. Which is reeeaaally bad. It blows my mind, actually, that such a thing is even possible on US territory.
- RightMillennial 9y agoI didn't mean this internet outage is worse than the Puerto Rico situation. That's why I said they're not comparable. The expanse of the internet outage is simply what makes it news worthy.
- Spare_account 9y agoAlso the novelty, it is a recent event. Puerto Rico's event has been happening for a while and is therefore less likely to be headline news.
- rovr138 9y agoIt's still hard back in PR. They're showing Power generation and usage statistics. They're not showing how many houses/businesses are really up. While things are better, they're not great. My mom is leaving her house open and our family further away and people she know that they can show up and load the washer and dryer. My grandpa brought his washer from his house. So that's 2 washers, 1 dryer running almost all day long. She's spending almost $200 more a month in power than she used to. So Percent of Power Generation or Percent of Power Usage != Percent of People connected.
- dotancohen 9y agoFor what it's worth, this is the first that I've heard of the Puerto Rico power outage. Interestingly, though, as an Israeli I already know that the "news" is designed to capture eyeballs and not designed to convey information. I know Africans who work online, this is potentially going to ruin them financially. However, having no power for months in a modern nation could potentially cost lives. Yet, no mention.
- lordnacho 9y agoThe scale sounds big, but isn't this kind of thing routine? I've had a line across the Channel that kept getting cut. You'd get this series of emails (more like a dozen): - Investigating outage - Cable ship being provisioned - Cable ship sailing to site - Cable spliced - Back online Pretty annoying when it happens, but it seemed to me like there was a whole infrastructure to deal with cable snaps.
- Scoundreller 9y agoI think Africa has less redundancy. Even if you’re served by multiple cables, companies may be less motivated to contract with > 1.
- walrus01 9y agoit is also a lot more expensive to achieve true 1:1 redundancy, for a mid sized ISP. let's say you're an ISP in monrovia, liberia. you can buy for N dollars per month a non redundant, single 10 Gbps transport circuit via the ACE cable that comes out the other end at some carrier POP in france, non diverse. now you want to achieve some sort of diversity in case your cable route is cut, as the present cable has been. you need to buy another separate 10Gbps circuit from monrovia to accra, ghana, going the other direction, establish a node in accra, and then buy another (physically diverse, in a different submarine cable) 10 Gbps circuit from accra to western europe. or buy a circuit from monrovia to cape town and then something that is guaranteed to be physically diverse from cape town onwards to the internet. either by getting a transport circuit from cape town to western europe/france/UK, or buying IP transit from .ZA ISPs, or some combination of the two.
- leoc 9y agoOnly-slightly-relevant but fun fact: back around the late ‘90s the UK’s university network JANET lost its Internet connection to the US through a combination of a cable outage and some bad preexisting dealmaking and BGP config. In the end of course it got fixed and JANET got firmly reorganized, but for several days or weeks you really could reach most or all European servers from UK universities but not US (North American?) ones. My details are fuzzy because it’s not easy to find any information about the episode anymore, but it really did happen...
- filleduchaos 9y agoHey, this hit me! Really annoying, especially since it was over the Easter weekend so getting a backup provider was next to impossible. I ended up having to manage my phone's data plan.
- mieseratte 9y agoIt's a real shame Puerto Rico is plagued with corruption resulting in poor infrastructure.
- drb91 9y ago...and ungodly debt. The situation is massively worse than Hurricane Katrina ever was.
- mieseratte 9y agoWonder how they got that debt...
- rdl 9y agoLess debt per capita than the US. The sad thing is most of the debt was post the 1996 US tax change when the US Government (President Clinton + Republican Congress) decided to phase out the pharma/manufacturing special deal for Puerto Rico. The government of PR basically didn't do much to try to replace that industry until 2006 when it actually left, then started massive borrowing to make up for the shortfall (operating expenses, not capital spending), then 2008 financial problems happened and it kept compounding. The hurricane was comparatively minor. PR people also engaged in protests bordering on terrorism (and some in outright terrorism) in the US or against US entities in the 20th century, and this colored the US-PR relationship. Most recently the Puerto Rico Vieques range protests caused the entire US military to basically pull out of PR, costing 6000+ jobs. In 2012 they put in place a bunch of new tax credits for businesses and individuals, and enhanced them in 2017. It may be too little, too late, but combined with privatizing the power grid and a bunch of other capital investment, it's a better outlook today than it was in 2006. The ~$70B in debt is a big problem but it can be restructured; what matters the most is that the economy actually works so there is some surplus to service and pay down the debt.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago> The government of PR basically didn't do much to try to replace that industry. We took away their magical money machine and those lazy bastards didn't even bother replacing it. Why do they keep themselves so poor‽
- rb808 9y agoI'm curious how vulnerable these under sea cables are. IE if there was a war, surely a few subs could snip a dozen cables and break the internet into pieces. Is that wrong?
- msl 9y agoSubmarine cables have actually been tapped in the past, so cutting them should not be much of a challenge. Blind Man's Bluff [1] is a book about this kind of thing (and all sorts of weird things that involve intelligence operations performed with submarines). It is one of those books that would not work if it were fiction: too unrealistic. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff
- froindt 9y agoI have a buddy who is working on a sub. He couldn't really say what he was doing with much detail, but recommended this book. He says it contains a lot of secret info which was acquired by the author basically becoming friends with lots of submariners and them over time mentioning things. I haven't read it yet, but it's on my list.
- walrus01 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter it's been modified to do something interesting, though whether that involves messing with the russian version of the SOSUS network, or tapping undersea fiber cables, is certainly classified at a very high level.
- Declanomous 9y agoKind of ironic considering Carter has a Nobel Peace Prize.
- walrus01 9y ago
- ListenLinda 9y agoAbout the internet the runs through the sea. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-the-internet-works-submarine-cables-data-centres-last-mile/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/05/how-t...
- walrus01 9y agothe business plans for how cables are financed have changed significantly since this was published, but the actual construction work is much the same. https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/ https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/
- ShakataGaNai 9y agoFor those that care about this sort of thing on a regular basis, are there any services that publish cable cuts/large scale outage information? It'd be terribly useful find out about major internet events on a more consistent basis. I see mentions of "Oracle Internet Intelligence" but not any sort of product behind it. One of their other blog entries mentions Akamai mPulse which is more performance based than outages (though it can be useful).
- walrus01 9y agodyn is primarily concerned with the internet at OSI layer 3: they are tracking the number of prefixes announced, from which particular ASes, and the impact that cuts, political interference and other events have on the global BGP routing table. they have considerably less of a view into what's going on at layer 1. What it looks like from their post is that if the cable is actually cut north of sierra leone, that a protection system was activated and traffic was re-routed via cape town, and then other, physically diverse routes which go from cape town to the global internet. (edit: possibly re-routed via physical diversity from Accra, Ghana or from Nigeria, both of which have a lot more unique cables connecting them to Portugal, Spain and France. Not necessarily a round trip all the way to Cape Town). what is actually going on with a particular cable at layer 1 is considerably more opaque. telecoms consider some of this information to be proprietary or guarded information. if you're a carrier with an IRU in a cable or a leased 10 Gbps circuit from city N in africa to a POP in France or the UK you will likely get periodic NOC updates, and eventually an RFO. other people who are not direct participants in the cable are not usually high on the priority list of the repair/maintenance operators. one of the things that major carrier and ISPs care about is knowing the truly physical diversity of their routes in and out of every POP. Knowing where stuff is "collapsed" (eg: two cables running together in the same duct bank to get to a carrier POP such as one wilshire), and where it is not. this is in the realm of GIS data that is usually not made public unless you need to know.
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- philprx 9y agoOf course, this cable cut has nothing to do with this: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-submarines-are-prowling-around-vital-undersea-cables-its-making-nato-nervous/2017/12/22/d4c1f3da-e5d0-11e7-927a-e72eac1e73b6_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russian-submarin...
- walrus01 9y agoit is usually fishing trawlers and anchors. not saying that russia and the usa don't have submarines with the capability to do so, but that everyone knows deep ocean submarine cables are vulnerable, and nobody wants to open up their own vulnerable infrastructure to retaliation.
- philprx 9y agohmmm... https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-undersea-fiber-optic-cables/ https://siliconangle.com/blog/2013/07/19/how-the-nsa-taps-un...
- walrus01 9y agoI admin some long distance DWDM systems... Cutting a cable and inserting a MEMS optical switch into a path would introduce a noticeable degradation in signal level on the Rx end. Not saying it isn't possible, or that they can't make it look like minor cable damage from being hit by an anchor. The far more likely scenario is that the NSA has per-circuit taps at major cable landing stations (New Jersey/New York area, in Cornwall, etc). The GCHQ has a huge facility very close to where a number of submarine cables land in Cornwall. Trying to tap and store the data from every wavelength in a 80-channel DWDM system is like drinking from a firehose of data.
- philprx 9y agoAgreed on the difficulty: you would aim first at the low hanging fruit for placing the taps, the easiest being the onshoring spots. But... for the MEMS, I consider this as one way only (public, probably crude/basic) and very possibly we'll learn of other techniques that are usable in say, 5, 10 or 20 years. That's what our taxes are financing in the end ;-) research on fundamental new ways to tap the neighbour/hostile country's fiber. Lastly, I wouldn't sweat it too much on data/speed capacity but more on power needed to process and Y-split this datafeed to exfil. If in the future we got to learn that micro/nano-nuclear powerstations were tied to submarine interception points, I wouldn't be surprised at all. The data/speed capacity is probably the less difficult part compared to seamless insertion, power and exfil system. Now all these are just guesses based on what's public so far thanks to Snowden & al.
- paulie_a 9y agoThe oceanic version of "back hoe fade"
- monochromatic 9y ago> While it may not have been completely problem-free over the last 5+ years, online searches do not return any published reports of significant outages caused by damage to the cable. That’s some solid journalism right there. “Well, I googled it and didn’t see anything.”