3 Undersea Communications Cables Cut Between Mideast & South Asia

[Paulie]

http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/third-undersea-cable-reportedly-cut/story.aspx?guid=%7B1AAB2A79-E983-4E0E-BC39-68A120DC16D9%7D

DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--A third undersea fibre optic cable running through the Suez to Sri Lanka was cut Friday, said a Flag official.

Two other fiber optic cables owned by Flag Telecom and consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 located near Alexandria, Egypt, were damaged Wednesday leading to a slowdown in Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and South Asia.

"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.

The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.

"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.

There are conflicting reports of how the two Alexandria cables were cut. Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while du
Sponsored by:
DU.AI, , ) , the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.
"It's ship anchoring," said the Flag official.
-By Tahani Karrar, Dow Jones Newswires, +9714 364 4965 [email protected]
Copyright (c) 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 01, 2008 05:09 ET (10:09 GMT)
-Contact: 201-938-5400

Everyone who was majorly affected is almost back up, except Iran. They're at 0%.

Interesting, as this happens to coincide with the next attempt of Iran to finalize the Oil Bourse

From that Wiki article:

Although opening an oil bourse has so far been unsuccessful, Iran has had success in asking its petroleum customers to pay in non-dollar currencies. On December 8, 2007 Iran reported to have converted all of its oil export payments to non-dollar currencies. [2]

Background

The three current oil markers are all US dollar denominated: North America's West Texas Intermediate crude (WTI), North Sea Brent Crude, and the UAE Dubai Crude. The two major oil bourses are the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) in New York City and the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) in London. The proposed Iranian bourse would establish a fourth oil marker, denominated by the euro.

December 2007 Iran stops accepting U.S. dollars for oil. [17]

January 2008 Iran's Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari told reporters the bourse will be inaugurated during the anniversary of the Islamic Revolution (February 1-11) at the latest. [18]

Could of course, be nothing. But 3 different undersea cables accidentally cut in different locations around the same time, with only Iran being left in the dark still?

First thing you do is cut your enemy's comm abilities.

Food for thought, folks. Take this info however you will.

 

[nibor]

OOOOPS....................they should KEEP them cut...........................wholey shit ya mean there's 5000 miles of cable missing.........................time to invest in Corning......................

 

[waltky]

Could dey? - Dey already have...

Could Enemies Sabotage Undersea Cables Linking the World?
30 Mar 2018 | WASHINGTON — Russian ships are skulking around underwater communications cables, causing the U.S. and its allies to worry the Kremlin might be taking information warfare to new depths.

Is Moscow interested in cutting or tapping the cables? Does it want the West to worry it might? Is there a more innocent explanation? Unsurprisingly, Russia isn't saying. But whatever Moscow's intentions, U.S. and Western officials are increasingly troubled by their rival's interest in the 400 fiber-optic cables that carry most of world's calls, emails and texts, as well as $10 trillion worth of daily financial transactions. "We've seen activity in the Russian navy, and particularly undersea in their submarine activity, that we haven't seen since the '80s," Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the U.S. European Command, told Congress this month. Without undersea cables, a bank in Asian countries couldn't send money to Saudi Arabia to pay for oil. U.S. military leaders would struggle to communicate with troops fighting extremists in Afghanistan and the Middle East. A student in Europe wouldn't be able to Skype his parents in the United States.

The Russian research vessel Yantar is shown docked in Buenos Aires, Argentina.​

All this information is transmitted along tiny glass fibers encased in undersea cables that, in some cases, are little bigger than a garden hose. All told, there are 620,000 miles of fiber-optic cable running under the sea, enough to loop around the earth nearly 25 times. Most lines are owned by private telecommunications companies, including giants like Google and Microsoft. Their locations are easily identified on public maps, with swirling lines that look like spaghetti. While cutting one cable might have limited impact, severing several simultaneously or at choke points could cause a major outage. The Russians "are doing their homework and, in the event of a crisis or conflict with them, they might do rotten things to us," said Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert at nonprofit research group CNA Corp. It's not Moscow's warfighting ships and submarines that are making NATO and U.S. officials uneasy. It's Russia's Main Directorate of Deep Sea Research, whose specialized surface ships, submarines, underwater drones and mini subs conduct reconnaissance, underwater salvage and other work.

One ship run by the directorate is the Yantar. It's a modest, 354-foot oceanographic vessel that holds a crew of about 60. It most recently was off South America's coast helping Argentina search for a lost submarine. Parlamentskaya Gazeta, the Russian parliament's publication, last October said the Yantar has equipment "designed for deep-sea tracking" and "connecting to top-secret communication cables." The publication said that in September 2015, the Yantar was near Kings Bay, Georgia, home to a U.S. submarine base, "collecting information about the equipment on American submarines, including underwater sensors and the unified (U.S. military) information network." Rossiya, a Russian state TV network, has said the Yantar can not only connect to top-secret cables, but could cut them and "jam underwater sensors with a special system." Russia's Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

There is no hard evidence that the ship is engaged in nefarious activity, said Steffan Watkins, an information technology security consultant in Canada tracking the ship. But he wonders what the ship is doing when it's stopped over critical cables or when its Automatic Identification System tracking transponder isn't on. Of the Yantar's crew, he said: "I don't think these are the actual guys who are doing any sabotage. I think they're laying the groundwork for future operations." Members of Congress are wondering, too. Rep. Joe Courtney, a Connecticut Democrat on a House subcommittee on sea power, said of the Russians, "The mere fact that they are clearly tracking the cables and prowling around the cables shows that they are doing something."

MORE