Another cablecut - sri lanka to suez Re: Sicily to Egypt undersea cable disruption

Fri Feb 1 17:47:39 UTC 2008

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu on behalf of Martin Hannigan
Sent: Fri 2/1/2008 5:01 PM
To: Steven M. Bellovin
Cc: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Re: Another cablecut - sri lanka to suez Re: Sicily to Egypt undersea cable disruption

On Feb 1, 2008 11:43 AM, Steven M. Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu> wrote:
> There's an interesting article at
> http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Internet-Outages-Cables.html
> on cable chokepoints.
>

"NEW YORK (AP) -- The lines that tie the globe together by carrying
phone calls and Internet traffic are just two-thirds of an inch thick
where they lie on the ocean floor."

This article is somewhat "misleading". Semantics, but it set the tone
of the article for me and probably most of the public.

The cables are able to have their physical characteristics changed by
the ability to splice joints into the cable and connect two physically
disparate ends to serve specific purposes related bottom geologies,
depth, and other dangers. Different cable types are deployed to
mitigate different risks such as fishing, quakes, slides, etc. The
lightweight cable may be thinner, but is used in less risky settings
like massive depths. When you get to something like heavy weight
armored on the edge of a fishing ground or winding through a
treacherous bottom geology, your're talking much larger diameters and
much more weight, as Rod Beck had mentioned previously.

There are many variables that go into route selection and cabling
which impact type. Cost is one.

-M<

Weight is a bigger issue than most people realize. In order to lift a cable out of the water and onto the deck of a Global Marine or Tyco Submarine ship, it has be cut and the two segments lifted out of the water, spliced, and then a 'joint' is placed at the splice point. The weight of even a thin cable is too great to be lifted without being cut in two. 

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