[admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest (Qatar to UAE)

Tue Feb 5 01:03:49 UTC 2008

My experience is that a lot of the BB providers route through NAPs/MAEs
when they have local peering. The Internet IS more brittle than it needs
to be, because routing seems to be a lot more static than it should be.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On 
> Behalf Of Steve Gibbard
> Sent: Monday, February 04, 2008 12:39 PM
> To: nanog at merit.edu
> Subject: Re: [admin] Re: Fourth cable damaged in Middle Eest 
> (Qatar to UAE)
> 
> 
> On Mon, 4 Feb 2008, Kee Hinckley wrote:
> 
> > Which leads me to my operational question.
> >
> > If you know that someone wants to cut your cables.  What defense do 
> > you have? Is there any practical way to monitor and protect 
> an oceanic 
> > cable? Are there ways to build them that would make them less 
> > discoverable? Some way to provide redundancy?  A 
> non-physical solution 
> > involving underwater repeaters? Or is this like pipelines in Iraq?
> 
> The other answer is to be less dependent on the cables.
> 
> Some communications need to be long distance -- talking to a 
> specific person in a far away place, setting up import/export 
> deals, calling tech support -- but a lot don't.  E-mailing or 
> VOIP calling your neighbors, looking at web sites for local 
> businesses, reading your local newspaper or accessing other 
> local content, or telecommuting across town, all ought to be 
> able to be done locally, without dependence on international 
> infrastructure.  Yet we keep seeing articles about outages of 
> "Internet and long distance telephone" networks, implying 
> that this Internet thing we've all been working on is pretty 
> fragile compared to the old fashioned phone networks we've 
> been trying to replace.
> 
> The report from Renesys
> (http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/02/mediterranean_cable_break
> _part.shtml)
> looks at outages in connectivity to India, Pakistan, Saudi 
> Arabia, Kuwait, and Egypt.  I'll assume that those areas 
> probably did keep some local connectivity.  India has its 
> NIXI exchanges, although my understanding is that they're not 
> as well used as one might hope.  Saudi Arabia has a monopoly 
> international transit provider, which should have the effect 
> of keeping local traffic local.  Egypt has an exchange point. 
>  I don't know about Pakistan or Kuwait.  Unfortunately, 
> little else works without DNS. 
> Pakistan and India have DNS root servers, but Pakistan's .PK 
> ccTLD is served entirely from the US.  Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, 
> and Egypt all have servers for their local ccTLDs, but do not 
> have local root DNS servers. 
> Of that list, only India has both the root and their ccTLD 
> hosted locally.
> 
> And then there's the rest of the services people use.  Being 
> able to get to DNS doesn't help people talk to their 
> neighbors if both they and their neighbors are using mail 
> services in far away places, for instance.
> 
> -Steve
> 