Analysis of recent incidents of submarine cable damage by Jon Gordon:

The blogosphere is awash with conspiracy theorists who see the recent damage to four Internet cables in the Mideast as an act of terrorism or war …. I just got off the phone with Eric Schoonover of TeleGeography, a research firm that’s closely following the story. His message: Relax people. These things happen ….

SCHOONOVER: We are confident that multiple submarine cables have been damaged in and around the Middle East in the last week now, specifically SeaWeMe-4 and Flag Europe Asia were damaged on January 30th; Falcon, which is an intra-Middle East cable that also connects to India was damaged the following day or the day after, depending on where you are in the time zone; And a fourth cable, Qatar UAE, was damaged a few days after that. The Qatar UAE cable, the rumor is the damage was in the power system rather than an underwater fault whereas the other cables seem to be cable faults, underwater. That is pretty much what we’ve been able to confirm. the cause of the faults, however, is still up for grabs.

The one thing to keep in mind is that these type of things do happen with some regularity. It’s just that you don’t hear about it in the news because typically it doesn’t take down as much capacity between regions as the original fault on January 30th did.

- Jon Gordon @ Minnesota Public Radio: Link.

“Google will join with five other companies to invest in a 10,000 km trans-Pacific submarine cable to carry data to and from Asia.”

Google said it would join with five other telecom companies — Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel — to invest $300 million in the construction of a 10,000 km submarine cable.

The high-speed fiber optic trans-Pacific cable, called Unity, will have a capacity of up to 7.68 Tbps and will run between the United States and Japan, about 6,200 miles. It is planned to accommodate demand for trans-Pacific bandwidth, which has grown at a rate of 63.7% annually between 2002 and 2007 and is expected to double biannually from 2008 through 2013, according to TeleGeography, a telecommunications consultancy.

… What Google gets is bandwidth at cost, said Stephan Beckert, director of research for TeleGeography, in an e-mail. Google, along with Comcast, is one of the few companies that have opted to purchase and light long-haul dark fiber, he said. It is the first non-telecom company to take an active role in submarine cable ownership.

- Thomas Claburn, InformationWeek: Link.

More details from SingTel

Using state-of-the-art Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) technology, it will support up to 960 Gbits per second per fibre-optic pair with a maximum of eight fibre pairs. By having a higher fibre count, it is able to offer more capacity at lower unit costs. Unity will have a potential design capacity of 7.68 Tbits per second, making it one of the highest capacity cables of its kind. This data rate is equivalent to more than seven million Internet users simultaneously having real-time access to a 1 Mb file.

NEC Corporation and Tyco Telecommunications have been jointly awarded the contract to implement this project.

- SingTel press release: Link.

Submarine telecommunications cable disruption

The 2008 submarine cable disruption involved damage involving up to five high-speed Internet submarine communications cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Middle East from January 23 to February 4, 2008 causing internet disruptions and slowdowns for users in the Middle East and India.

- Wikipedia: 2008 submarine cable disruption

Spying? Sabotage? Could be economic or psychological warfare against Iran (or other parties). Or not: might be normal breakage, the wear and tear on thousands of miles of cables. Impossible to tell: if spy submarines are cutting cables, maybe installing taps, the mission is probably too secret for the truth to come out anytime soon. Meanwhile, here’s some more links:

Wired: Cable Cut Fever Grips the Web

Engadget: Fourth undersea cable cut near UAE, suspicions rise

Boing Boing: Reports of 5th undersea ‘net cable cut

Slashdot: Fifth Cable Cut To Middle East

Khaleej Times: Cable damage hits one million Internet users in UAE

CNN.com: Internet failure hits two continents

MSN.com: Ships did not cut internet cable

AntiWar.com: The Cable-Cutter Mystery

GovernmentExecutive.com: Cable Cut Paranoia

Richard Sauder: Connecting The Many Undersea Cut Cable Dots

Internet Traffic Report: Asia

Gabriel: Comment and links