What’s Cutting the Cables, Cont.
Posted by Ben Worthen
BizTech readers are really interested in global communications – or a good conspiracy theory.
As today’s Journal explains, under-sea fiber-optic cables are what makes globalization possible. Satellites, the only other option for passing data between continents, are much more expensive to operate and have less capacity than cables. The irony of undersea cable is that it doesn’t make money for the companies that operate it, Stephan Beckert, a research director at TeleGeography, a telecommunications-industry consulting firm, told us the other day. Yet, demand keeps rising, so companies keep laying more and more.
Several of these cables have been cut over the last week, disrupting Internet connectivity in some countries in the Middle East and Asia. And this has got the conspiracy theorists working overtime. There’s some disagreement over how many cables have been cut: Beckert says it’s three; most news reports put it at four or five; this guy says it’s at least nine (although he’s also written books about alien-inhabited undersea bases, which we suppose also explains how the cables are getting cut.)
The other day we wrote that the most likely explanation was an errant boat anchor. And, indeed, we’ve just received word that Flag Telecom, which operates the cable that was cut between Dubai and Oman, found an abandoned five-ton anchor at the scene. We did allow that there was a chance – albeit slight – that the cables were cut by sharks with laser beams on their heads. But by and large, our goal was to persuade people to take off the tinfoil.
That didn’t stop BizTech readers from contributing conspiracy theories of their own. There were some obvious ones – the CIA, Mossad, Islamic terrorists – and some that we hadn’t thought of — Godzilla, Gamera and the monster from Cloverfield. Our favorite theory: “The citizens of Atlantis are pissed off about pollution, overfishing, and destruction of undersea habitat, and they aren’t going to take it any more!”
Have a peek, if you've time on your hands, the comments are priceless
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