Two undersea fibre optic cables were cut in the Mediterranean causing a bandwidth crisis in India and the Middle East. The cause has not been revealed.

Of course I have no idea what happened, but it's sort of hard not to wonder if maybe someone was installing some additional hardware onto those cables. Or maybe it was just a ships anchor. Or swamp gas.
- jim 2-01-2008 8:10 pm

Lots of info here.
- jim 2-01-2008 9:56 pm


Most likely culprit would be fishing trawlers.
- Jim Bassett, the elder (guest) 2-07-2008 6:24 pm


more on this (the "additional hardware" theory seems entirely plausible)
- tom moody 2-08-2008 1:57 am


Thanks, I had been reading a similar report, but couldn't find the link again. (so the answer could be CIA or MOSSAD fishing trawlers.)
- L.M. 2-08-2008 2:11 am


We did tap Soviet underwater telecommunication lines in operation ivy bells. Pretty good story! And the present day U.S.S. Jimmy Carter submarine is rumored to have undersea cable tapping capabilities. So it's not totally left field. Seems sort of brute force though. If you're the US government you'd think you could just convince Cisco to let you introduce some modifications into their routers, similar to what the NSA most likely did with the encryption machines from the beyond reproach totally neutral industry leading Swiss company CryptoAG. These things happen. Obviously the stakes are quite high and people are willing to do whatever they can get away with.

But it's all just interesting to think about. According to a Wired article, Stephan Beckert of TeleGeography Research says "[c]able cuts happen on average once every three days" in which case this is really run of the mill stuff. The only interesting thing is how little redundancy there is in the intrastructure of some of these Mid East countries. Of course that's not too surprising.

I read someone's comment on the NANOG mailing list recounting a 19th century British admiral stating that there were only 5 strategically important points you needed to control the world: Dover, Gibraltar, Suez, Cape Town, and Singapore. And when he looked at the undersea cable maps - especially where these cables come together at landings - it's basically the same story today in terms of the global information grid.
- jim 2-08-2008 2:32 am


nice map from Guardian
- mark 2-08-2008 3:12 am





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