Third submarine cable break since January 30
On Friday, along with other bits of tech news, I wrote about a damaged submarine cable off the coast of Egypt that caused a disruption in Internet capacity in India. Folks in India said that they were functioning at 70-80% of capacity on Friday.
Today, another submarine cable in the Middle East was damaged, making it the 3rd such incident since Wednesday. According to the BBC article, Wednesday’s incident resulted in disruption of 70% of the nationwide Internet network in Egypt and up to 60% disruption in India.
The first breakage site is 8.3 km from Alexandria and the repair is expected to take a week after the repair ship arrives on February 5. The second site is 56 km from Dubai, and a repair ship is expected to arrive at the site in the “next few days.”
According to the research firm TeleGeography, the cuts have reduced the amount of available capacity on the network between India and Europe by 75%. The cause(s) of the breaks is/are unknown.
Update 02/06/2008: The 2008 submarine cable disruption in the subject of a Wikipedia article.
-Bill at Cheshire Cat Photo