From Marc parent's mparent7777-2.blogspot.com comments:
Also there is one more cable.
The Q-TEL damaged somewhere inbetween Haloul, Qatar and Das,UAE 1 february.
http://www.itp.net/news/510132-internet-problems-continue-with-fourth-cable-break
so with the list from KhaleejTimes who mention a cable cut in Penang Malaysia which for me still is unconfirmed the total number of damaged cables should be 6
A very interesting article on many fronts is posted below.
Primarily, it can be discerned that Israel is counting on its MURKAN pals to help them build a new, very pricey internet system. NIIIIIIIIIIICE.
Two, the poor victim Israel story continues, even as they are killing Palestinians, committing GENOCIDE shamelessly.
People who don't support the militarist State of Isreal are not necessarily anti-semites, in fact far from it. We think the State of Isreal does not serve its people well.
It is quite intereting to see that ONLY Isreal and Iraq have service. How bloody convenient.
By the time this was written it was clear five that had been cut (and this is supposedly up to date) and why is that not something "fishy".
Love the way they pick on globalism's outsourcing, as that solved some type of problem.
There have been NO ships in the area of the cuts, so say the traffick controllers (I've worked for a Portuguese shipping firm in NYC, know how the telexing actually works - this is a nonsense below) so they would be EASILY verifiable if there had been any.
The first tiny url given does not work - it is gone and I suspect he knows that. I use IC publications myself for sourcing - my ex-hubbie was the editor of Middle East Magazine for many years, so I know what information they get, how they get it and WHY they put out that magazine. It is reliable for many reasons - but what they are using is incredibly stale. What's interesting is that precious little (none) about the cable cuts is even on there.
The second tiny url is in Hebrew only so we will not know what that website says.
Gee, if Israel thinks there should be a back up cable, it would like to stump up the funds to pay for it, wouldn't ya think?? I mean, who's to pay for it, it was incredibly expensive to put in in the first instance.
Another refutation - WHAT HI TECH ISRAELI economy? It's one of the poorest countries. It has defense high tech, the population is not high tech!!
And to refute his last suggestions which are: 1) The importance of redundant systems for an an advanced hi-tech economy; 2) The importance of a strong navy to keep troublemakers bent on economic terrorism from cutting the cable; and 3) The importance for ship captains to make sure they don't drop anchor in the wrong place.
1. yes, but what is Israel going to do with the coming climate change - keep on depending on high tech militarization as the only solution, as the symbiotic partner America seems to think is The Answer - keep your dukes up and keep on a fighting forever? No country or empire has thrived with that attitude.
2. How does he know this is economic "terrorism" or there will be in the future. Why would anyone hurt their own cause by cutting these cables? What would that advantage be?!! For heaven's sake! This appears to not be hurting Isreal, only nations where the "terrorists" are!! Who does he think is footing the bill for the navy now? Is the US taxpayer supposed to buy them MORE warships??
3. Not supportable by evidence. What ships? Five idiot captains?
Oh, this one has been well thought out, the plans must have been conceived and planned for quite a while - that's why I have my eyes peeled on those who are monitoring the havoc and trying to figure out what they are learning from this (enormously expensive) escapade.
Who stands to benefit? That's the latest pseudo-scientific/sociological/political watchword when anti-Semites seek to blame Israel for modern tragedies.
What about 9/11? Of course it was "the Jews" - who else stood to benefit from making al-Qaida look bad? The hijackers were Saudis, you say? Irrelevant - leave it to Israel to recruit authentic Arab double agents to hijack planes and fly them into American landmarks.
It seems there's nothing that can't be blamed on the Jews - whether its missing Christian children during the Middle Ages - in the classic take on the "Blood Libel" - or the massive Internet outage that hit the Arab world over the past week. Well, not just the Arabs - India has had a lot of Internet problems, and Iran may still be 100 percent without Internet access after several underwater, fiber-optic cables were damaged or cut.
The outages, which many in the Arab world and the far-Left, hate-Israel community are already blaming on you know who, began about a week ago. A pair of undersea communications cables between Egypt and Europe - the data "lifeline" for much of the Arab world - broke about 8 kilometers off Alexandria's harbor, which was closed most of the week due to the massive storm that hit the region. India, which also uses the FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 cables, was severely hampered, wreaking havoc with much of the world's back-office data-processing, and leaving frustrated Americans without the technical assistance that India does so well. Banks in the Gulf region were hurting, and officials said it could be a week, maybe two, until things get back to normal.
Besides being used for fast Internet communications, the cables also carry digital phone calls and TV signals. So even the many people in the region who don't use the Internet were affected, as the legions of guest workers in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia couldn't make phone calls to family or transfer their salaries home to places like the Philippines and Pakistan (which had its own Internet problems). Several African countries that use the cables, as well as Egypt and Syria, were all out of Internet luck too.
And then there was Iran. On Friday, a third cable - maybe a fourth, according to some accounts - got cut in the Persian Gulf, slowing the already bottle-necked traffic that could still get through, and cutting off Iran. Curiously, according to the anti-Israel crowd, there were only two countries left unscathed by the cable fiasco: Israel and Iraq. (I read contradictory reports on Lebanon.) Hmm.
According to the companies that own the Mediterranean cables, the outage was apparently caused by the anchor of a ship that spliced a cable when it fell overboard. (I haven't heard any explanation yet for the Gulf cable.) Although it seems a little too coincidental, it's not unreasonable for weather related mishaps to occur in the middle of a major winter storm on the high seas. As far as the Gulf is concerned, I wouldn't be surprised if this (http://tinyurl.com/yqf3ka) was the explanation.
Of course, logic never comes into play for these people; it's got to be Israel's fault. Well, I've got a theory of my own. Instead of saying that Israel and/or the CIA - which, as we all know, controls Iraq nowadays - deliberately cut the cables to isolate the Arab world, and especially Iran, and set it up for "something," I think it was the Arabs/Iran themselves that did the cutting to make Israel look bad by having something to blame on us. Or we could just call it a draw, and attribute the breakages to bad winter weather and infrastructure failure - not unheard of with underwater cables.
Why wasn't Israel affected? Simply because we use a different cable, with Egypt and company refusing to allow Israel to rent bandwidth on the same one it uses. Israel's cable is called MedNautilus (http://www.mednautilus.com), originally put together by a consortium that involved Israelis, but is now wholly owned by Spain's Telefonica.
"Our" cable travels under the Mediterranean Sea from Tel Aviv to Sicily, and looks on the map to be several dozen kilometers north of the broken Egyptian cable.
Considering how important these cables are for business and telecommunication, one would think there would be a backup system of some sort to avoid the outages and data-pipe shortages that have been affecting nearly a billion people over the past week.
Unfortunately for the Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Iranians and Indians, there was apparently no sufficient backup data communications system to keep their businesses going. And the same holds true for us.
Actually, we have it worse than others in our neighborhood. While some reports said Saudi Arabia was able to partially restore its service using "terrestrial routes" (overland cables, I guess), we don't have that option. For high-speed communications, MedNautilus is the only option.
There are two other cables available, the EMOS and CIOS systems, which have been around since the early 1990s (MedNautilus was set up in 2001). But according to one Internet expert I spoke to, they "couldn't hold the bandwidth of even one big Israeli ISP today, much less all of them." Not to mention that the price of access on MedNautilus has been rising in recent years, making things much more expensive for ISPs and keeping prices relatively high for many customers.
And what would happen to Israel's hi-tech economy if the line to the West was down for a couple of weeks?
The solution to both the redundancy problem and the high prices on MedNautilus would seem to be the construction of another high-speed underwater communications cable. Last month a number of Israeli ISPs got together to discuss doing just that (http://tinyurl.com/ypak5e). Unfortunately, given that the investment in such a project could reach tens of millions of dollars, it's unlikely to get off the ground, many experts believe, even if all the communications companies work together to lower risks.
If the mess in the Arab Internet world last week should teach us anything, it should teach us three things: 1) The importance of redundant systems for an an advanced hi-tech economy; 2) The importance of a strong navy to keep troublemakers bent on economic terrorism from cutting the cable; and 3) The importance for ship captains to make sure they don't drop anchor in the wrong place.
http://digital.newzgeek.com
ps - there were NO tankers seen, none at all, BBC be damned.
 Ships are now in place off the coast of Egypt to start repairs |
Flag Telecom, one of the firms responsible for the cables, says it will take about a week to be fixed.
The break in cables has caused disruption to net services in the Middle East and India. The cause is still not known.
Repairs will involve a team of about 50 people, including navigation experts and cable engineers, said Flag Telecom.
The ship that will repair the first severed cable is already in place, with repairs underway, while the second vessel is expected to begin work on Tuesday.
Bespoke ships
"It will be a highly technical job and should take a week to complete," a spokesperson for Flag Telecom told the BBC News website.
The cause of the damage has not been officially confirmed but there have been reports that the breaks were related to a tanker dragging its anchor along the sea bed.
INSIDE A SUBMARINE CABLE 
1 Polyethylene cover
2,4 Stranded steel armour wires
3,5 Tar-soaked nylon yarn
6 Polycarbonate insulator
7 Copper sheath
8 Protective core
9 Optical fibres
Not to scale
However, the Egyptian communications ministry has denied any ships were in the area at the time of the break.
The first job in such a situation was to find the exact location of the damaged cable, said Mark Harper, manager of cable system support at Cable and Wireless.
The firm is not involved in the repair operation, but has carried out similar work in the past.
Often the location of a break can be found by cable engineers back on shore. The areas affected by the outage will give key clues as to what part of the cable is broken.
To get a more precise location, cable engineers can send light pulses along the fibres in the cable using a device known as a Optical Time Domain Reflectometer.
When the pulses hit the broken part of the cable they will bounce back and by measuring the time it takes for them to return, engineers can ascertain the location of the damage to within tens of metres.
The next stage is to employ a specially fitted cable ship, which will have onboard remotely operated vehicles (ROVs).
Fishing
If the ROV is able to locate the cable it can cut out the non-working sections and pull the cable back onto the ship.
Alternatively a device onboard known as a grapnel can hook the cable from the sea floor and drag it on to the ship.
"The first option is preferable because it means you can recover the cable very close to the end whereas a grapnel is less precise," said Mr Harper.
Grapnels have been in use for hundreds of years, since the first telegraph cables were laid.
The damaged cable can be repaired on the ship at which point a technician will splice new cable to the existing pieces.
Once repaired it can be lowered back to the seabed.
Two cable operators were involved in this most recent outage.
FLAG Telecoms, which has responsibility for the Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe (FLAG), a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable and SEA-ME-WE 4, or the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 project - which links South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East.
There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, and India suffered up to 60% disruption.
Disruption also occurred in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, reported the Associated Press.
In Dubai, at least two internet service providers (ISPs) were affected.
In December 2006, seven of the eight cables connected to Taiwan were damaged by an earthquake, disrupting communications in much of Asia.
These cables took several months to fully repair.
Natural disasters are one of several causes of cable outages.
In this case, an errant anchor has been blamed and Mr Harper believes there is "still a partial conflict between the needs of shipping and of telecoms".
But it is not the biggest problem facing cable operators.
"Fishing is still the biggest issue. Historically in Europe trawler fishing has been a problem although in the last 15 years most cables have been buried in the seabed to overcome this," said Mr Harper.
Who cuts undersea cables in the Middle East? Internet connectivity still remains slow in several Middle East countries due to the cable damage near Egypt, Iran and Dubai. An improvement is not expected soon as operators claim there are many complexities involved in fixing the problem. In addition, all voice calls, corporate data and video traffic were also affected. The first two cables, off Alexandria in Egypt, were cut on January 23. Over the weekend a looped cable in the Gulf waters was cut in two points, off Dubai and off Iran's Bandar Abbas. The cuts have raised many conspiracy theories on their reasons. However, the International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding undersea cables, has declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches, adding investigations were underway. In the UAE, an estimated 1.7 million Internet users have been affected by the recent undersea cable damage, an expert said, quoting recent figures published by TeleGeography, an international research Web site. In the UAE, nearly 90 per cent of Internet traffic is routed through undersea cables and only 10 per cent is done through the satellite. Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, told Khaleej Times: “The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.” A total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been damaged with a fault in each. These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria. © 2008 Mena Report (www. menareport.com)
Posted: 05-02-2008 , 10:53 GMT
