undersea cable cuts

[Dave Howe]

Gabriel Rocha wrote:
> I have read several posts on this both here and on other lists, the news
> seems not to be reporting much about this and the conspiracy theories
> abound. Today however, I read a rather interesting piece on The
> Economist which I found interesting enough to post here for comment...
> 
> According to them, this is just a well publicized string of coincidences
> and in one case, one cable was taken down by the operators themselves.
> The assertion that these cables fail relatively often, yet go unreported
> is also interesting to me. The other interesting statement is that this
> did not have a massive impact on Iran's internet infrastructure. The
> latter would have the impact of nullifying many theories, if true. What
> do folks here think? --Gabe

   There *has* been an unanticipated upsurge in the number of outages - 
ISP and technical mailing lists are full of discussion of this, but most 
don't come to the same conclusion (i.e. that the most likely cause is 
just randomness throwing up a number of such events all at once). 
However neither do they jump at blaming terrorist acts or bungled spying 
- in the former case, the results/cost of a cut is sufficiently detached 
from anyone terrorists would really want to influence that it is 
unlikely, and in the latter, it is assumed that anyone with the 
technical capabilities to tap a submarine cable at those depths is 
sufficiently competent to not leave it in two pieces afterwards. Nor is 
this an anticipated increase due to the age or number of cables.

   I would however not be surprised if it was a result of some fishing 
fleet coming up with a "new and improved" way of dragging a huge net 
behind themselves to scoop up fish, which involved dragging heavy 
weights behind the net on the ocean floor that could get caught on 
cables - they certainly aren't going to admit to it and take the 
financial hit of being held responsible for the repair costs.