CircleID

There were actually three (3) transoceanic cables cut last week—see also:

"Third Cable Cut Compounds Net Woes"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7222536.stm

...and the Renesys folks have a lot of detailed information over on their blog:

http://www.renesys.com/blog/

Cheers,

- ferg

A report by the Egyptian Ministry of Transportation said that cable cut was not caused by ship's anchor: http://ukpress.google.com/....

Undersea cables break from time to time. Basic knowledge of plate tectonics tells you, for example, that Africa is moving north towards Europe. There was a massive outage in late December 2006, just south of Taiwan, cutting several cables.

The difference from corporate networks is that ISPs tend not to pay for the redundancy necessary to cover predictable outages.

There are alternate routes to India, across Russia, around Africa or across the Pacific, but buying capacity for an eventuality like a cable break is expensive. It is easier and much cheaper for ISPs to make a lot of noise for a few days, until the cable is repaired. Rather than provide 99.99999 per cent reliability, they just cut capacity to customers who have bought a best efforts service and must wait for the repair ship.

Ewan