Internet Interruption - Back bone of communication Strained

India and other neighboring countries have been facing interruption in internet services since Jan 30, 2008, a problem caused by a discontinuity in two submarine cables (see picture below), that are the backbone for delivering internet across the globe. Bloomberg covered the news (followed by a series of updates) on their site. Later, there was a press release from the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and IT, that it would take at least two weeks to sort the problem out.

On Thursday, Jan 31 2008,TeleGeography provided an update on the situation. Here is a picture that represents how the cables are laid.

Source: TeleGeography’s Submarine Cable Map 2008

Gigaom’s Alistair Croll had an article (yesterday) that said how the two cables, said to provide redundancy are just 2 kms apart. This is truly alarming in more than one way.

Also, BBC reports another 3rd cable being cut on Friday Feb 01 2008

Lets take the case of India - who are the people that are affected by this interruption?

• Outsourced entities like Call Centers, BPO’s, KPO’s etc.
• Global companies with development centers in India
• Companies in India who do a lot of collaborative work with companies in other continents

Literally everyone is linking to all other parts of the globe for information gathering, communication, work, sharing etc. This interruption is probably more catastrophic for the IT space than anyone else. We can control other aspects, but if the backbone of communication is not entirely fault proof, then we need to think about the issue very seriously.

Natural calamities and accidents are bound to happen. A similar incident took place off the coast of taiwan and subsequently internet interruption affected Southeast and Northeast Asia. In this case, a seismic fault was responsible.

We need to take the approach of what businesses on a higher plane do, when it comes to safeguarding the back bone of communication. For instance, Visa/Mastercard have multiple routes, to offer an uptime of 100% in case of accidents or calamities. Similarly, fault tolerance plans are in place for mission-critical industries like Banking, Finance etc., including their Disaster Recovery.

Is it the cost involved in having a distributed cabling system that make authorities complacent to having a disaster management system in place? Or do they expect these disasters to happen less frequently, that this can be considered as a one-off occurrence?What happens if this becomes an easy target of the intruders/hackers in the general sense?

Many Internet Service Providers and other communication people are into buying Fiber Optic Cables and are looking at acquiring fiber optic communication companies with added benefits to their existing infrastructure. A little googling brought this up. Here is another instance in Egypt, where the cut happened (A deal between Telecom Egypt and Alcatel). When consolidation and deals in this space are taking place in a big way on a global scale, should there not be a consortium or a team effort by all these companies in looking seriously into this issue?

What do you think? Any information to add to the above will help bring about awareness.. On the contrary, do you opine that this is not a problem? Write to me.

Tags: cable fault-Egypt, internet disruption