By: Les Cottrell SLAC and Qasim Lone NIIT/SLAC
On January 31st, 2008, the NY Times, BBC, The Guardian, CNN and many others reported undersea cable cuts in the Mediterranean. There is also a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ). One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and another in the waters off Marseille, France. The two cables were damaged within hours of each other on Wednesday morning of January 30th 2008. Operators believe the damage was caused by ship's anchors during a heavy storm at sea. One of the cables, Sea Me We 4, is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route. The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan. The cables are separately managed and operated. The outages mainly affected the Middle East and Asia. Most disrupted communications were quickly rerouted through the remaining SEAMEW3 cable or fibres taking the other way around the globe. The cables involved are shown in the Telegeography map below. There are also world maps from Telegeography and Alcatel.
We decided to look at the impact on Internet connectivity as seen by the PingER project measurements seen from SLAC (near San Francisco in California). These are very simple ping echo measurements of Round Trip Time (RTT), Loss, jitter etc. the variations for a given path are typically caused by congestion. The measurements provide a sample of the Internet connectivity to over 150 countries of the world, countries that between them contain over 95% of the world's population and 99% of the world's Internet connected population.
...