As Two Undersea Fiber Internet Lines Cut, Focus is on China, Russia
I bet this shows up as a surprise to exactly no one. There are at least 600 undersea fiber lines that connect the world. While these two going away at roughly the same time is annoying, the Internet is quite resilient.
However, depending on WHICH fiber lines are cut, the problems can be more severe.
C-Lion1, one of the cut cables, runs between Finland and Germany and has a reported speed of 120 to 144 terabits per second. Think of it this way. If you had a 500 megabit cable Internet connection, this cable could move 288,000 of those connections running full blast, at the same time, so it is big.
The other cable that was cut is the BCS East-West Interlink submarine cable. It runs from Lithuania to Sweden’s Gotland Island. While the capacity of this is not public, it likely is very big as well. Since it is older, it is probably not as fast, though.
Another curiosity. These two cross each other under the Baltic. Probably a coincidence.
A Chinese ship, the Yi Peng 3, was near these cables at the time of the outages. The Chinese ship left the Russian port of Ust-Luga on November 15th. Chinese ship; possibly Russian crew. Again, another coincidence.
Not a coincidence is that five Danish navy ships have been following this ship and the Chinese ship is now “anchored” with the Danish navy nearby. I.e. If you don’t anchor, you won’t have to worry about that. We are the Navy and we know how to use it.
No one except maybe crazy people think this was an accident.
What the Russians and Chinese are up to is unclear. With all of the satellites in the sky it is not like they thought that no one would notice. Maybe they are testing the response.
It is a test of the emergency response of cable repair crews. Two different cable repair ships are enroute. The repair ship Cable Vigilance left Calais, Frances today at 7 PM Eastern European Time and is expected to be in the cut zone by Monday at the latest. They hope to have the C-Lion1 cable repaired by the end of the month. Key word is hope.
Earlier in the year we saw fiber sabotage in France around Paris when multiple fiber cables were cut. Those were easier to fix since you don’t have to send divers or mini-subs down to find the ends, bring them to the surface, splice the cables and drop them again.
We have also seen multiple fiber cuts across the U.S., but none of them as big as this. So far.
Assuming this is possibly a test, if the Internet is important to your business, you might want to think about what kind of redundancy you have in your Internet service.
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Credit: The Register
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