Ok - we are bit late to the game but digging up good data was a bit harder than we thought. There has been a lot of blog and media buzz over the last two weeks regarding a spate of submarine telecommunication cable failures. Various reports have counted as many as nine failures, but the best documented number of failures I’ve found totals the failures at six:

1. Consortium cable SeaMeWe-4, 12.334 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend.

2. Qtel’s cable from Haloul (Qatar) to Das (UAE), in the Persian Gulf. Probably not a cut, but damaged power system due to weather.

3. FLAG’s Europe-Asia (FEA Segment D), 8.3 km from Alexandria, in the Mediterranean. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend by cable ship CS Certamen.

4. FLAG’s FALCON (FALCON Segment 2), 56 km from Dubai, UAE in the Persian Gulf, on the route to Al Seeb, Oman. Currently under repair, should be fixed by this weekend. This cut was due to a ship’s anchor–an abandoned 5-6 ton anchor was recovered by FLAG at the site (see photo in FLAG’s update, PDF)

5. FLAG’s Europe-Asia (FEA Segment M), 28 km from Penang, Malaysia. Scheduled for repair on February 11 by cable ship CS Asean Restorer.

6. FLAG’s FALCON (FALCON Segments 7a and 7b), two faults on the cable between Kuwait and Bandar Abbas, Iran, scheduled for repair on February 19. (Courtesy of the Lippard Blog)

Much of the blogging and media coverage has been around conspiracies that these submarine cable failures are sabotage by a various number of hypothesized bad guys. We thought it would be useful to see what this all looks like on a map, so we collected all the substantive data we could find and posted it up.

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The map illustrate the fiber routes (red is the SeaMeWe-4 fiber route and blue is the FLAG fiber route), landings (blue and red pushpins respectively) and finally the fiber cuts (red flames). Each of the objects on the maps have details about the fiber routes, landings and details to date on the fiber cuts. They also provide some perspective on the cause of the event - namely it is unlikely the failures were a coordinated attack or sabotage. As the map indicates the failures were literally all over the map and one geographic region was not targeted. This is further confirmed by Renesys’ analysis of the fiber failures by country impacted:

This is reinforced with the visual mapping of the countries which further drives home the point the failures effects were well distributed and not targeted at any one region:

Official reports from FLAG determined the FALCON failure in the Persian Gulf to be the result of an anchor (specifically a 5 ton anchor they recovered on sight). So, the short conclusion is it is most likely the last two weeks has been a statistical outlier and not a conspiracy of some variety. It is even not that large of an outlier with Global Marine saying they report 50 cable repairs per year and that is just one firm. Fact is many cables fail on a regular basis, and the failure in Alexandria, Egypt of two major cables drew everyone’s attention and folks saw what happens - a good number of small breaks happen on a regular basis. The more important lesson here is that there are many natural geographic bottlenecks in the infrastructure that powers the Internet - whether it is a tunnel into a major city or the Suez canal - there are often very limited right of way by which to lay fiber. This is something technology will never change, and awareness of these bottlenecks is something worth paying attention to - whether you are major corporation or a nation state. While these failures do not appear to be the result of foul play - I will say that locating and failing a submarine cable is a good bit easier than many people would like to think - and no you don’t need the USS Carter to do it.

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