Cable Cuts Disrupt Communications
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India and countries across the Middle East experienced slow Internet connections and disruption to international calls to the United States and Europe yesterday after two submarine cable systems in the Mediterranean Sea were cut.
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Multiple fiber cuts to undersea cables show the fragility of the Internet at its choke points.
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Alternative currents Sending broadband signals over electricity cable has always confused people.â¦
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Radio interference that harms wireless network performance is a way of life, columnist Craig Mathias says. Fortunately, tools are available to help solve that problem.
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Two underwater cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday morning, dragging Internet connections throughout the Middle East and in parts of Asia to a crawl.The cables, one operated by Flag Telecom and the other by a consortium of 15 telecommunications operators, account for 75 percent of the network capacity between Europe and the Middle East, according to Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography Research.A third cable was undamaged, but it is older and has far less capacity than the others, he said.Operators believe the damage was caused by ship anchors during a heavy storm at sea, Beckert said. Wire services reported that ships heading for Egypt&#39;s northern coast were diverted due to the storms, and their anchors may have severed the cables several miles from shore.AT&amp;T confirmed that its service to some areas of the Middle East was affected, but said it was now re-routing traffic. Etisalat, the telecommunications provider in the United Arab Emirates, reported that both Internet traffic and international voice calls were affected by the incident. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states were affected, Beckert said.As much as 70 percent of Egypt&#8217;s Internet network was down, and over half of India&#39;s bandwidth was cut due to the disruption, according to a report from Reuters that cited local officials.Most of the major operators have backup plans in place for this type of incident, Beckert said. In this case, they&#39;ll have to route traffic from the Middle East to Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, through the U.S. and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, he said. That will result in latency problems that will likely lead to sluggish connections until the cables are repaired, he said. The operators in the Middle East told him that they should be able to repair the damages in one to two weeks.The accident should affect mainly Internet traffic. Voice calls travel over the same cables, but operators will give priority to the voice calls, which take up relatively little capacity but produce more revenue than data traffic. Beckert estimates that 1 percent or less of traffic carried on the cables is voice.
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One Wired News correspondent cuts his connection to the cable company and doesn't look back. Can the internet supply enough video programming to entertain a family of five? By Robert Lemos.
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Underpromising in order to overdeliver can't make up for sluggish operating results.
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(InfoWorld) - Guns, saws, and some very dim-witted thieves were all apparently involved in a network blackout that affected Internet users, primarily in the northeastern United States, earlier this week. Cogent Communications said Thursday that a cable cut that occurred near Cleveland on Sunday night was caused by a saw, not by gunshot as first thought, but technicians struggling to replace the cut cable used a replacement cable that had been shot. Cogent was one of several operators affected through Monday evening when two-thirds of a mileÂ of cable was cut between Cleveland and the tiny town of Montville, Ohio. With more than 32,500 miles of fiber, Cogent is one of the largest network operators in the United States. Crews rushed in to fix the problem only to discover that their replacement cable had been damaged by gunshots. "The original cable was not shot, it was the replacement cable," Cogent said Thursday. "The original cable was cut with a saw of some sort. Police are speculating that the thieves thought the cable was made of copper." Copper prices have spiked in recent years, spurred in part by increased demand from China, and theft of all kinds of copper, including wires, has become common. Unfortunately for the Cleveland thieves, fiber-optic cable is made of glass fibers, not metal. Cogent did not name the service provider whose lines had been cut, but a source familiar with the situation said the lines are owned by Level 3 Communications. Level 3 did not return calls seeking comment. TeliaSonera lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut, the company said. Grant Gross in Washington contributed to this story.
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Yesterday&#39;s decision by the Federal Communications Commission to remove barriers to the delivery of broadband services over power lines may give consumers a third broadband option.
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By Arshad Mohammed, Washington Post Staff Writer  Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin J. Martin yesterday dropped plans to vote this week on whether to require cable companies to carry extra digital channels produced by TV broadcasters, suggesting he could not muster the votes.
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The Democratsâ decision to withdraw from a Fox News debate makes the cable channel part of the story.
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The nondescript cable box is the object of a lot of frenzied lobbying over at the Federal Communication Commission these days, with consequences for your pocketbook and how you watch television. - Jonathan Krim
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The Cable-Telecom skirmish is beginning to hit home for apartment and condo dwellers.
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In a Jan. 14 story, The Associated Press, relying on information from Comcast Corp., erroneously reported the company had received letters of inquiry from the Federal Communications Commission. The company received one letter, not multiple, regarding complaints that it actively interferes with its subscribers' Internet traffic.
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Delivery of broadband service over power lines could catch on in areas with limited phone, cable outlets, says research firm.
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Leading U.S. cable company's results impacted by cost to lure subscribers.
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The N.F.L. and its network have run into a granite wall in their battle against several major cable companies.