James Niccolai at Network World is reporting robots are now searching for the ends of undersea cables cut last Friday.
Undersea Robots. Huh. “Welcome to the future, ladies and gentlemen. In lieu of flying cars, please take this funny picture of a cat.”
Network traffic was disrupted when two cables, the Sea Me We 3 and Sea Me We 4, located between Sicily and Tunisia, were severed.
Immediately following the cuts, average network response times between India and the rest of the world increased to three to four times their normal level, while network availability dropped at one point to 72 percent, according to Keynote Systems, which measures Web site performance. Performance and availability to India had returned to “almost normal” after 1 p.m. GMT Friday but continued to fluctuate.
If this story seems familiar, it’s because last February, the same thing happened to undersea cables in the Middle East. Network traffic was disrupted and delayed while the problem was repaired.
Back then, conspiratorially minded geeks posited the idea of there being a conspiracy to cut the Internet cables as precursor to some sort of military action. We interviewed Eric Schnoover at TeleGeographyback then, who explained that, yes, sometimes cables get accidentally cut. He also pointed out that while it’s common knowledge that “the Internet routes around damage,” he explained that when you’re talking about the amount of capacity that these undersea cables are responsible for, that the Internet simply can’t route around that much damage – that someone had to pull a switch somewhere to get some sort of restoration.
Any time you go the long way around the world to get your traffic, you’re going to end up with increased latency, and any time massive amounts of capacity is cut off, you’re going to create congestion with the amount of demand out there.
One interesting thing about the conversation with Schnoover that probably bears repeating now:
The thing to suffer the most would be the Internet. Because that’s not as latency sensitive as voice or real-time business communications, the carriers allow it to be more affected by the problems than the other services.
This is reassuring unless you are one of the many companies that run their real-time business communications over the Internet.
Between the Taiwan cables snapping in December 2006, the undersea cables in February or the undersea cable outages of last Friday, the moral is the same: Have a backup plan.
Find restoration paths, and have existing agreements with your service providers should a massive, unforeseeable infrastructure problem occur. Have diversity in providers, if you can, and, of course, monitor connections to make sure that you’re able to detect and monitor abrupt changes in your traffic patterns.
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