Let me explain. In the 1990s, we saw a grotesque number of cables laid under the Atlantic and Pacific, connecting the United States with Japan, parts of Asia Pacific and Europe.

Those three regions went through an unprecedented boom, much of it inspired by technological changes that had millions turning to the Internet. The boom, also inspired by deregulation of the telecom infrastructures in those countries, led to further spending on communications such as wireless phone calls and high-speed Internet. Unfortunately, the demand (captured quite well by bandwidth provider Global Crossing in early days) led to overbuilding, oversupply and eventually a bust.

Growing Fibers In Asia

A similar scenario is now playing out in the Trans-Pacific region where cables are being built rapidly, and the bandwidth capacity on pre-existing cables is being doubled. Many more cables under construction are connecting with India and China, both of which are going through their own economic booms. According to the World Bank, China is the world’s second largest economy, and India claims the fourth spot. These countries have become economic hubs — not only buying but also selling to the outside world. And a key ingredient of trade is the ability to communicate, which in turn requires the large amount of capacity that can only come with undersea fiber cables.

The latest such effort is SEACOM, a $650 million, 15,000-kilometer cable connecting East Africa with Asia and Europe that is expected to be completed in June 2009 and provide 1.28 Terabits per second of network capacity. This is just tip of the iceberg.

According to TeleGeography, a research firm that tracks the global broadband business, there are about 12 cables either in planning stages or under construction that will connect Africa to the rest of the planet. Those connections will have a theoretical capacity of over 13 Terabits per second, and construction is estimated to cost more than $3 billion.

In Africa, Mobiles Drive Bandwidth Demand

Why so much connectivity? After all, PC penetration is abysmally low in Africa. The answer is cell phones. At the beginning of 2008, there were a quarter of a billion mobile subscribers on the continent, according to International Telecommunications Union, and Portio Research estimates the number will increase to 378 million by 2011. Local companies are furiously building out networks, and by all indications, the overall market penetration is going to increase from the 28 percent mark reported at the start of this year. Cell phones need networks to transfer calls between countries, so there is a need for networks to circle the continent -- or at least countries like Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa, which have the most critical demand.

In the recent past, India went through a similar cycle, where a spurt in mobile sales acted as a catalyst for the overall economy. Phone calls provide the vital connections for trade to flourish in areas hitherto unconnected. Something similar is happening in Africa, where mobile banking has emerged as a facilitator of cross-border trade.

You can see a similar scenario set to play out in other parts of the world. There are about five cables on the drawing board or under construction that would connect Cambodia, Bangladesh, Vietnam and some of the smaller countries in Asia. All these countries are going through an economic upsurge and are becoming part of the global economic system.

This leads me to my conclusion: Building new cables is the equivalent of adding new roads, new shipping lanes or flights. The undersea fibers of today are what sea trading routes were in the past — an indicator of future economic activity and the subsequent boom.

This article first appeared on BusinessWeek.com

The Kenya ICT Board deputy CEO, Victor Kyalo, speaking at a regional telecommunications forum, said Kenya will lay an extra 90 kilometres of cable skirting around Somali's territorial waters and will instead run the cable in international waters as it makes it's way into the Arabian Peninsula and finally terminating in Fujairah, U.A.E. where Emirates Telecommunication Establishment (Etisalat), Kenya's partner in the project, is located.

Civil war in Somalia has almost split the country apart with Islamists controlling the south and Somaliland to the north claiming sovereignty. This volatile situation has made the coastal areas of Somali a no-go zone for all maritime traffic after several incidents of ships being hijacked were reported in the international press.

Kyalo also said that the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Communication, Bitange Ndemo has visited the Lucent-Alcatel facility in France where the cable construction is going on and said that everything is going according to schedule.

The government of Kenya is a majority shareholder in this project with 85% ownership while U.A.E's Etisalat owns 15%.

WW1.0 (web war I)
there's an interesting article by joshua davis in WIRED MAGAZINE: ISSUE 15.09 about how hackers took down estonia's web/technology based commerce, media, and government in the end of april 2007 by launching a coordinated attack on the country's electronic infrastructure. a teaser from the article...

"Väärsi tried to pull up his competitors' Web sites. They were down as well. He knew he had only one choice: to sever the international connection. He keyed in a few lines of code and pressed Enter — and all international requests to the paper were suddenly blocked. In the eyes of the world, the Postimees Web site disappeared.

Instantaneously, the bandwidth meter turned green. The site became accessible again within Estonia, but at a cost. Estonia's leading news outlet could not tell the world what was going on in its own country. Though this was a 21st-century attack, Väärsi used the same defense Estonia had used against Russian invasions four centuries earlier: He had closed the gates, pulled up the ramparts, and settled in for a siege."

the article has an in depth discussion of how the attack was coordinated, but in short it consisted of script kiddies — "troublemakers" who copied scripts from hacker sites that launched floods of ping queries to specific web targets, botnets - individual "zombie" PCs that were compromised by malicious code (i.e. a virus) and were under the control of hackers-> used to send large amounts of data to specific internet addresses with the goal of overwhelming the site (a "distributed denial of service" (DDoS)), and hackers who attacked specific targets to alter their content (i.e. to change the home page of a website to a desired political message).

IT specialists countered the botnet attacks by disconnecting infected computers (by sending requests to ISPs to suspend service), but according to the article, they were unsuccessful in identifying the coordinators of the attacks (though recent political events pointed to a suspect). the botnet attack stopped after two weeks.

anchors away
in the end of january, 2 undersea web/telecommunication cables were cut in the mediterranean knocking out a good portion of the area's connectivity. as discussed by the the economist, countries were able to reroute traffic to a certain degree, but

"Egypt lost 70% of its internet connectivity immediately. More than half of western India's outbound capacity crashed, messing up the country's outsourcing industry. Over the next few days, as cable operators sought new routes, 75m people from Algeria to Bangladesh saw internet links disrupted or cut off."

----

i think both events demonstrate potential vulnerabilities of the web as a networked system... in one case, knocking out an edge in the mediterranean disrupted service for 75 million users, and in another, a coordinated/infected group of nodes (hundreds of thousands of infected computers) + hackers were able to disrupt ~1.3 million estonian's web/telecommunication with the outside world. to return to rita's question about whether or not it's still possible to get lost in modern society (that's how i remember the question two days later in any case) i think that if users have their identity/location based in/on the system, then knocking out the system would probably result in some people getting lost.

My own speculation led me to consider the soon to open Iranian Oil Bourse as a motive for these disruptions. In fairness though, I did also mention James Bond like spies, and The Incredible Mr. Limpet as possible suspects in the outage too. But if you must, go ahead and color me a tin foil hat weirdo. I am guilty, I guess.

As a techie, I still find it odd that so many cables in the area went down concurrently. Original reports had Iran 100% down, and that was incorrect. It certainly made me reconsider sources for future links.

I think that this has been an interesting experiment in media studies for me - seeing how much speculation and chaos could come from a bunch of nerds wondering why something broke. The bigger issue is that the speculation itself became a bigger story than the original outages. I am still getting several hundred hits a day on the postings from this story.

Because of all this, I learned a lot about the Iranian Oil Bourse, or commodities market. This is a very big story on it's own, and is definitely worth learning something about. It of course has had very little mention in the U.S. media, despite how much it may change (or not) our economy, and the oil market globally.

Yours in the brotherhood of weirdness,

the (still) inquisitive techie

Is India's BPO industry facing an information blackout threat from undersea sabotage? That might sound like a plot from a James Bond movie. While the facts are not clear, the fears are.

Five undersea cable disruptions in less than a fortnight have sent shivers down the spine of the country's thriving business process outsourcing industry. They have raised questions on the back-up available for the telecom lifeline of the industry that employs more than six lakh people and exports about $10 billion-worth services.

Even as repairs were on at the site of an Internet cable cut in the Persian Gulf and another two north of Egypt in the previous week, news came last Monday of a fourth cut in the same region that disrupted voice traffic Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. A fifth cut was reported later from near Penang in Malaysia.

More: 

read more | digg story

While I for one am skeptical about the likelihood of this many cables going down concurrently, I am however, awaiting judgment on it's role in any number of nefarious world domination schemes. Here's a cool chart of the Internet's Undersea World,, and an old soviet era underground sub base you could use in case you wanted to build your own undersea lair.

Some folks are less than thrilled with the The Internet Traffic Report site that many (including) myself have used to determine Iran's Internet availability. There are many .ir sites that are still functional.

The one scheme I am holding out for is the disruption of the opening of the Iranian Oil Bourse. Read this bold proclamation by the Iranian Finance Minister about the opening of the long delayed Bourse, complete with predictions of doom for the United States Economy, on a .ir site that is up.

The new oil market will be the first outside of the US or London, and will not trade in dollars, but will base its trades on the Euro, dealing a blow to the dollar. The opening of the Bourse has reportedly been delayed again by the recent outages, one of many in a long series of delays for the Bourse.

One could see many interests in the U.S. not wanting the Bourse to open. couldn't they? Anyone who has read anything about Peak Oil would be a little suspicious.

... or maybe it was this guy:

Aparentemente as dificuldades de comunicação que o medio oriente vem enfrentando com a Internet continuam. Fala-se em 5 cabos que transportam o sinal de Internet como sendo danificados. Falava-se também que o Irao estava sem conexao (noticia ja desconfirmada), ao que se sabe e é certo é que a capacidade de conexao em boa parte do medio oriente e alguma asia, baixou consideravelmente. VSAT para que te quero.

Here are a collection of recent stories at this point:

• Cut four undersea cables, shame on you, cut a fifth, also shame on you
  Engadge.com (Contains a map of where the cut cables are located)
  6 February 2008
• Cable damage hits 1.7m Internet users in UAE
  khaleejtimes.com
  5 February 2008
• Clarification on Iran and exaggerations of full Internet Loss
  Slashdot comments:
  6 February 2008
• Google search for sites ending in .ir and hosted in Iran (you can set that option by the cr=countryIR)
  http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&cr=countryIR&as_qdr=all&q=site%3A.ir
• Ruptures call safety of Internet cables into question
  International Herald Tribue (iht.com)
  4 February 2008
• How one clumsy ship cut off the web for 75 million people
  guardian.co.uk
  1 February 2008

From the engadget article: "For the fourth time in a week, an undersea communications cable has apparently been cut (or "failed due to a power outage," as some sources suggest), and while no official reports of subversion have surfaced just yet, things are beginning to get suspicious." The New York Times first reported these outages back on January 31st.

An article in the Khaleej Times reports that there have actually been FIVE major undersea cable outages since January 23rd, all which can likely be attributed to ships dragging anchors while fighting rough weather.

So here's one small thing that bugs me - the reality is that undersea cables don't break that often, they do break often I guess - see below. If you look at the Wikipedia entry for undersea cable, there have been a few accidental breaks in the past few years, but only a few over many years, or at least as noted in this article.

Therefore, it seems a logical conclusion is that no huge multinational conglomerate telco, like Flag Telecom, would spend hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, over 17 years, to install a massive global communications network to the Middle East, and install cable in a manner that would easily break, or be snagged. Undersea cable is simply too expensive to install, and even more expensive to repair. The likelihood of five ships dragging anchors into five cables in five days seems slim, doesn't it? Here's a link on Alacatel's site that shows how they BURY undersea cable when they install it.

Cable piracy is a new phenomenon, according to the International Cablemakers Federation. There have been reports of undersea cables being "un-installed" in the South China Sea. In Vietnam young thieves have caused millions of dollars in damage to communications networks while stealing telecom cable for scrap.

On a creepier note, Ziff Davis reported way back in 2001 that spy agencies had shifted their intelligence gathering efforts to these underseas networks. One person at ilovebonnie.net points out that there are interesting disparities in the geography in reports regarding the cable outages.

Whatever happens here, it just reminds me that the Internet that we all take for granted now could be removed from our lives very quickly, and succinctly, with must a few snips, and a few power switches thrown. The pirates in Asia simply took cable, and caused weeks long outages. No technical experience required for this position.

Half a continent and a few countries were just bounced off the Internet altogether, for reasons yet to be determined, in just a few days time. I am certain that the estimated 10,000,000 internet users in Iran, and the governing powers of all nations determining their fate, are now fully aware of the suddenness of this outage, and its potentially larger long term consequences.

Update: ABC NEWS has come out with their theory on this, and it seems to make the most sense. Outages in undersea cables are fairly common it seems. The reason that we don't hear about them more often is that there is a large amount of redundancy in data networks, and the breaks don't usually cause any delay in traffic, let alone outages here in the U.S.

Internet traffic in the middle east is routed through several single cables, each susceptible to total failure, unlike most of the remainder of the Internet. Could this whole problem be poor network design, and a weaker Internet in a developing area of the world? Time will tell.

There's apparently a huge undersea communications cable coming through the Pacific Ocean. So Telikom and Arthur Somare, you think we can get a slice off this pie for some competitive internet pricing?? Could the cable hit PNG or run by us before it gets to Australia from Guam or Hawaii?? Read more below...

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Posted: 21 Sep 2007 02:16 PM CDT: http://www.techcrunch.com

Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, according to a report from Commsday.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, and Google is said to have met with Telstra (Australia’s largest telco) and Asia Netcomm in Sydney last week. The cable would run to Australia via Guam and Hawaii.

Interchange cable fees have always been a large issue for Australasian telco’s, with accusations from Australia and Asian countries that they are treated unfairly by US providers in terms of cost for data. In Australia at least, the cost of internet access is significantly higher that in the United States. Google’s move to provide a competitive Pacific Cable service could slash data costs for countries including Australia, Indonesia and even Singapore and Malaysia.