VSNL CANTAT-3 Optical Submarine Cable

Tue Dec 18 18:50:10 UTC 2007

So in a former life I experienced first hand this cable between 97 and 99 and it had quite a few issues and outages some that lasted a significant period of time. One of which was a failure in the Iceland region caused by a boat of some description. Id need to boot up my old sparc to untar the mail backup to be sure though.

Its was a great cable for cheap links for EU to US voice but for Internet the additional C.70ms from PP to NYC made it suboptimal however in the late nineties bandwidth was still relatively pricey most trafic EU to US was paid all by the EU SPs and Cantat3 was cheap and had less half circuit type issues than other TAT cables.

Regards,
Neil

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Hannigan <hannigan at gmail.com>
Sent: 18 December 2007 15:47
To: neil at domino.org
Cc: Rod Beck <rod.beck at hiberniaatlantic.com>; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: Re: VSNL CANTAT-3 Optical Submarine Cable

On Dec 18, 2007 8:11 AM, Neil J. McRae <neil at domino.org> wrote:
> > How about VSNL CANTAT-3? Any idea what's going on here?
>
> Its a very old cable which I'm sure must have passed its service life by
> now. It was frequenty affected by issues near iceland. (trawlers IIRC
> etc).
>

It's just approaching 15 years old and I think for '94 that this is
the expected lifespan. In January of '06 there was a major outage on
Cantat-3 that took a very long time to repair. This is why most people
can even recall the name. Check the nanog archives if you are
interested in the discussion that took place here.

There is a major fishing ground north of the cantat route off of
Iceland and south of Hornsfjordur , but the cable does not run through
it as far as I know, a little to East, and the "big" outage was
situated in the North Sea, southwest of Bergen, Norway. I'm not sure
about other outages. I have found some interesting stuff in some NOC
archives though.

Best,

Martin