Triple cable break hurts international connectivity

This explains iBurst's problems this weekend.
 
Is that why my games are lagging. Lots of disconnects (more than usual) on Mweb uncapped lately.
 
You'd think that there would be a sort of no anchor zone for the cables ect to help prevent them from being damaged.
 
NomNom said:
You'd think that there would be a sort of no anchor zone for the cables ect to help prevent them from being damaged.
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There is indeed, and according to feedback we have received the cable operators are planning action against the ship for violating the various ‘no anchorage zones’.
 
What is kind of worrying is that there are 3 cable systems in such a tight space that can be easily caught by dragging an anchor - would it be easy to intentionally do this?
 
Bern said:
What is kind of worrying is that there are 3 cable systems in such a tight space that can be easily caught by dragging an anchor - would it be easy to intentionally do this?
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The anchor accidently fell off the ship. It happens all the time even with Italian captains.

Sent from my HTC Sensation Z710e using Tapatalk
 
Bern said:
What is kind of worrying is that there are 3 cable systems in such a tight space that can be easily caught by dragging an anchor - would it be easy to intentionally do this?
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This is a tough one. The Red Sea is a very busy shipping lane so the cable operators would only be able declare a fairly narrow 'no anchorage zone'. Even so - you'd probably find that these cables are spread out by a few km and the ship dragged anchor for quite a while to do this much damage.

This is why you really want to purchase capacity on cables that are very geographically diverse. One on East coast and one on West coast is best for South African operators.
 
ambo said:
This is a tough one. The Red Sea is a very busy shipping lane so the cable operators would only be able declare a fairly narrow 'no anchorage zone'. Even so - you'd probably find that these cables are spread out by a few km and the ship dragged anchor for quite a while to do this much damage.

This is why you really want to purchase capacity on cables that are very geographically diverse. One on East coast and one on West coast is best for South African operators.
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So I Google Earthed it, see there is basically a bottleneck just north of Djibouti where it gets to about 20km wide, I can see that this area could be a problem. Then again as you get to Egypt it gets all narrow again before the canal. Surprising a ship captain would be so dumb that he doesn't realise he is in a no anchor zone - especially since there would be a lot of shipping traffic in a tight space and that is not really where you want to not have control of your vessel (dragging an anchor is not control).

What I do find interesting is all our international traffic seems to be routed via the UK and the very Western European countries - I am surprised that SAFE/Seacom/EASSy don't have options to go via Asia to the US for example. I realise it is much further and latency would be bad, but still better than nothing.
 
Bern said:
What I do find interesting is all our international traffic seems to be routed via the UK and the very Western European countries - I am surprised that SAFE/Seacom/EASSy don't have options to go via Asia to the US for example. I realise it is much further and latency would be bad, but still better than nothing.
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SAFE goes directly across the Indian Ocean: From the Kwa-Zulu Natal coast, via Mauritius and India to Malaysia. The problem is that most websites and servers that South African's are interested in are hosting either in Europe or the USA. Via SAFE that would be 800+ms of latency. There are also routes out of Mombasa and Djibouti going East that would allow you to hop off EASSy or Seacom and bypass these danger zones but once again this is a very long path to get back to the US ;)
 
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