4 ms·

For 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

For 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 ago
dyn 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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- xraystyle 9y ago
  This guy networks. But yes, generally the actual physical location and routing of fiber optic cables is not made public by the companies that run it for a number of reasons. If you're leasing fiber you can request maps of the circuits from the company providing it, but there's generally no way to obtain this info outside of this type of business relationship. Additionally, when purchasing a long-distance circuit, the provider selling you the circuit may not be the company that actually ran the cable. You might have to go several layers deeper until you get to whoever actually owns the fiber. For example, connections like MPLS VLLs present as a direct layer 2 connection but can pass through numerous other network providers' core networks underneath. This all means that keeping track of layer 1 is pretty much impossible outside of the circuits you pay for yourself.
tyingq 9y ago
I'm involved in similar activity, but not ocean cables. Just regular "oopsies" with a backhoe killing one link in our pretty big US centric WAN. It's very difficult to get the various carriers and LECs to share information, so we mostly collect it post incident. It's also sometimes difficult to get enough info to know that you've actually got diversity. Like, perhaps I have one line with Zayo, and one with Sprint. Confirmation that they don't share conduit is manual and tedious. Basically, we have to maintain all this info ourselves.

walrus01 9y ago

dyn 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.

deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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xraystyle 9y ago
This guy networks. But yes, generally the actual physical location and routing of fiber optic cables is not made public by the companies that run it for a number of reasons. If you're leasing fiber you can request maps of the circuits from the company providing it, but there's generally no way to obtain this info outside of this type of business relationship. Additionally, when purchasing a long-distance circuit, the provider selling you the circuit may not be the company that actually ran the cable. You might have to go several layers deeper until you get to whoever actually owns the fiber. For example, connections like MPLS VLLs present as a direct layer 2 connection but can pass through numerous other network providers' core networks underneath. This all means that keeping track of layer 1 is pretty much impossible outside of the circuits you pay for yourself.

tyingq 9y ago

I'm involved in similar activity, but not ocean cables. Just regular "oopsies" with a backhoe killing one link in our pretty big US centric WAN. It's very difficult to get the various carriers and LECs to share information, so we mostly collect it post incident. It's also sometimes difficult to get enough info to know that you've actually got diversity. Like, perhaps I have one line with Zayo, and one with Sprint. Confirmation that they don't share conduit is manual and tedious. Basically, we have to maintain all this info ourselves.