Undersea Cable Damage

[Arun 795]

I hope you are aware of the undersea cable cut near Egypt couple of days ago which knocked out internet services in India. I guess BSNL was most affected, along with VSNL and Reliance. Though my VSNL/TATA Indicom WiMAX connection in Bangalore did not have any problem. Even though it will take about 10 days for the damaged cable to be restored, ISPs are implementing alternate routes through the Pacific and Atlantic. For those who have been affected by this disruption, how is the connectivity now? Stable or still slow and which ISP are you using ?

[ashoksoft 83]

Slow ... BSNL( Office)

cheers

karki

[lostjournal 7]

Slow..

Still better than yesterday and the day before..

I am using reliance Broadnet..in Trivandrum.

[ssr 10]

I hope you are aware of the undersea cable cut near Egypt couple of days ago which knocked out internet services in India. I guess BSNL was most affected, along with VSNL and Reliance. Though my VSNL/TATA Indicom WiMAX connection in Bangalore did not have any problem. Even though it will take about 10 days for the damaged cable to be restored, ISPs are implementing alternate routes through the Pacific and Atlantic. For those who have been affected by this disruption, how is the connectivity now? Stable or still slow and which ISP are you using ?

Does implementing an alternative route helps ISP to offer more bandwidth or its just a backup line?

[I_C_U 10]

Mine TATA DSL Connection not affected (Mumbai).

[@ksh@T 20]

mine waSA AFFECTED FOR A DAY NOW OK!

[vijaykv 5]

Hi,

Mine MTNL Tri Band - was too slow for the last two days. Today it is better.

Vijay

[Honest 836]

^^^

My dear friends, now a days I'm using Vodafone Advance GPRS and their is no problem for me till date.

Regards.

[Arun 795]

Does implementing an alternative route helps ISP to offer more bandwidth or its just a backup line?

like a backup route... some traffic has been routed via SEA-ME-WE3 cable system, but much more of the traffic is routed the other way around the world, across the Pacific Ocean. There could be delay in milliseconds than the normal route.

[Nirvana 4]

Sify in Bangalore... connection is fine now, no problems.

[KumaarShah 143]

BSNL, Chennai- so far no problems here. I have not been online for longer periods to really know if there was any slowness.

P.S.: Today the speeds are really pathetic. the d/l speed is only 17kbps and the pages take ages to load. Y'day and day before, it was not noticeable.

Edited February 2, 2008 by KumaarShah

[copperco2 24]

i did not know if anything was wrong.. speed was as always....patheitc on the triband front.

[HetalDP 947]

BSNL is Connected to Singapore have no Problem at all

[manishag 17]

no problem on Airtel BB in Delhi but Reliance and Airtel BB is slow in Noida office

[@ksh@T 20]

well mine was ok yesterday but i dont know what happened today! bull**** 17k download speed!

[sougatadc 358]

I hope you are aware of the undersea cable cut near Egypt couple of days ago which knocked out internet services in India. I guess BSNL was most affected, along with VSNL and Reliance. Though my VSNL/TATA Indicom WiMAX connection in Bangalore did not have any problem. Even though it will take about 10 days for the damaged cable to be restored, ISPs are implementing alternate routes through the Pacific and Atlantic. For those who have been affected by this disruption, how is the connectivity now? Stable or still slow and which ISP are you using ?

My Dear Arun,

I use BSNL's Home 500C+ BB.

On that day, some sites, specially from US and Russia were not opening at all, or were quite slow. But during night it became okay. I have automated downloading from 2:01AM to 7:59AM by making the computer to reboot at 2:01AM (to be safe from being billed) and through a batch file which connects the internet and the downloads start for the files which I queue up beforehand in my download accelerator. By this way, I have used almost 12GB data in three days of February 08. On 1st Feb night, my downloads were for more than 3GB, on the 2nd, it was almost 4GB and last night it was touching 5GB. I am attaching the snapshots of the DataOne bandwidth calculator.

So, BSNL is fine at my place.

Regards...

Feb08_Chart.pdf

Feb08_Summary.pdf

[Arun 795]

I'm on BSNL Home 500 plan as well now, and the speed looks OK for browsing. I haven't checked downloads, have qued them up for the night !

This is how the "alternate route" method worked out when the cable broke...

Hydra-headed nature helps Net rebound after cable cut

Times News Network

February 04, 2008

It was just a blip on the monitoring screens of a fortified room in Chennai, but a full-blown crisis 5,500 kilometres away, off the ancient city of Alexandria, Egypt. Last Wednesday, in the worldwide puppetry show called internet, a string had snapped. The Western world, with banks and factories and telephone networks to run, had just lost connection with its housekeeper and doorman, India. There was only one thing at stake: global business.

The potential danger from the two breaks in undersea cables in the Mediterranean was immense. Western businesses and customers depend on global connectivity to outsourced service providers such as India to run their daily affairs.

A disruption could have stranded them in a virtual no-man’s-land and India could have lost credibility as an always-on supplier of an ever-growing variety of services. Except that none of this happened. India and world can thank the design of the internet, Hydra-headed as it is, to this happy turn of events. Within a few milliseconds, life was back to normal, almost.

It was not by coincidence that the breakdown in SEA-ME-WE (South East Asia, Middle East, Western Europe) and FLAG (Fibre-optic Link Around the Globe) cables that carry the bulk of data and voice traffic from India to the West left only a limited impact for businesses. It was the combined effort of a dynamic disaster recovery technology and quick intervention by machine and humans that averted a catastrophe.

“In a way, this cable break showed how robust internet is, because data traffic got rerouted dynamically and there was not more than a delay of 60 milliseconds,” says Sify technology vice-president PK Saji. “With such a cut in the traditional switched network, you would have got cut off totally.”

Most of the connectivity among nations is through optic fibre cables laid under the sea. Satellites cannot match their capacity and land cables can only go so far. Undersea cables connect continents and some of them are nearly as long as the Earth’s circumference. For instance, SEA-ME-WE 3 is one-inch thick and 39,000 kilometres long. Ten such cables can stretch all the way to the Moon.

Ten years ago, the whole of India had only 1 gigabits per second (gbps) of international connectivity through these cables. That was what 500 high-speed internet users in the United States enjoyed. This tenuous link was virtually meaningless to large companies trying to provide outsourcing services online to the rest of the world. Just one bottleneck would’ve cut off the country. So, those who could, bought their own connections and others waited on the fringes.

As private players entered the internet service provider business and as the country entered the new millennium, capacity started growing rapidly. Today, India has 18 terabits (tbps), that is 18,000 times the bandwidth that it had a decade ago. In addition, there are a number of privately accessed cables that go out of the Indian coast.

The major cables that knot India in the global web are SEA-ME-WE 3 and 4, FLAG, i2i (India to Island) and TIC (Tata Indicom Cable). Smaller, but important, systems are FALCON (FLAG Alcatel-Lucent Optical Network) to Saudi Arabia used by Reliance group and Bharat-Lanka Cable System to Colombo used by Bharat Sanchar Nigam. Hundreds of such cable systems criss-crossing the seabed form a mesh of bandwidth around the world.

Internet data is split into small capsules called packets, each of which can travel separately but be regrouped with others at the endpoint. If there is a cut in one of these wires, data packets can bounce off those lines and travel through other lines. In switched networks like traditional long-distance telephony, this is not possible.

“IP (Internet Protocol) networks are the new generation technology to route any traffic through any route, any time. But for this resilience, the system would have collapsed with such a cable problem,” says Internet Service Providers Association of India president Rajesh Chharia. For high-value customers such as outsourcing companies, the rerouting gets done automatically by the systems at the ISP’s hub.

For instance, at Sify’s control room in Chennai, the computers poll the global cable network, on land and under water, every 30 seconds. “It can be a powercut in Kashmir or a cable break in the Mediterranean. It takes a maximum of 30 seconds for the traffic to go on another line, say, through Singapore,” says Saji.

The hero of the last week’s cable break incident, at least for India, was i2i, which links Mumbai with Singapore via Chennai. It has an operational capacity of about 160 gbps, but can light up to a whopping 8.5 tbps. It took a bulk of the rerouted load and essentially served as the alternative route to the US and Europe.

The twin cable breaks in the Mediterranean robbed India of about 1.4 terabits of bandwidth. This was less than 10% of what India could tap from its existing connections. Compare this with a similar cable break in December 2006, when an earthquake in Taiwan region, cut of 20 tbps. That time, thankfully, it was on the eastern side and the India’s traffic towards the US and Europe was not affected.

The real sufferers during cable breaks are the individual internet users. Their connectivity is low priority for many ISPs who derive much of their profits from companies. The benefits of dynamic rerouting don’t come free. Large users pay a premium fee to make sure cable cuts don’t stop their traffic. For the small guy, a cable break could lead to disconnection or sluggish download speeds. Despite ISP claims, the small guy took a big knock during last week’s problems.

Internet industry experts say the incident has shown that it is far too risky for a company to have its own line under the sea or subscribe to just one connection. Contrary to the sophisticated image of global networks, the world communicates through a small number of bottlenecks and a snap could mean trillions of dollars in losses.

“I expect this incident to teach a lesson to our ISPs. They will all now rush to book capacity on other lines such as i2i. This will spur demand for the Pacific side cables,” Chharia says. “At the end of it, it was a close shave for India. When the whole world is looking to India, we couldn’t have let this shake our reliability.”

[vishalkumar 0]

P.S.: Today the speeds are really pathetic. the d/l speed is only 17kbps and the pages take ages to load. Y'day and day before, it was not noticeable.

Man, you got atleast 17kbps, I use Reliance here and I got around 7-8kbps. It was very frustrating. It is better now.

[coolrajiv 1]

Internet speed may be restored by Wednesday

Engineers Zero In On Problem Site Located 8.5 Km Off Alexandria In Egypt

Even six days after the undersea cables that carry internet traffic were damaged off the Egyptian coast, services in India continue to remain slower than normal. Telecom operators say this is a function of the complexities involved in setting the problem right.

The cables that carry the traffic lies deep under the water. Not just that, the cable isn’t buried. It is simply bound to the seabed at some locations using ‘stings’. As the currents change, the cables drift between these stings. That makes it tough for engineers to pin point the location where the cable is damaged. Add to this the fact that the damage usually isn’t physical. It is electronic.

‘‘It’s like detecting leakage of water in a pipeline,’’ said a spokesperson for Flag Telecom, one of the affected companies.

‘‘You measure the quantity of water that gets in through point A. Then, you measure the quantity of water coming out at point B. Depending on how much water has been lost, you mathematically compute where the leakage is,’’ he explained. In the case of undersea cables, you measure the amount of data lost in transit.

Using this technique, engineers have figured out that ground zero is within 8.5 kms off Alexandria in Egypt.

Having done that, they sent out two large ships carrying a few miles worth of fresh fibre optic lines to make the repairs. ‘These ships will be able to pin point the exact location where the damage has occurred by Tuesday,’’ said the spokesperson.

That done, the vessels will activate the high precision positioning system (DGPS), which allows the ship to hold the position so that it doesn’t drift while the repair work in underway. Cable engineers will hoist the damaged part, and replace it with a new stretch of cable.

This process can take anywhere between 18-24 hours (on Wednesday), say experts.

The repaired cable will then lowered back to the seabed on ropes. Until then, however, all major internet service providers in the city will be forced to divert data through the Pacific region, which means data has to pass via the US west coast and on to the east and finally to UK and Europe, causing a delay of for every single transaction.

[Arun 795]

Bharti makes hay while the sun shines !

Reliance Communications and Bharti Airtel spar over link charges

Economic Times - 6 Feb, 2008

The cut in undersea submarine cables near Egypt’s northern coast last week which had impacted internet services in India, has now led to a war of words between India’s largest private telcos — Reliance Communications (Rcom) and Bharti Airtel.

The issue began with Rcom, whose undersea cables FLAG and FALCON were damaged, seeking additional capacity from Bharti on the latter’s i2i cable. Rcom has alleged that Bharti was severely overcharging — up to 12 times — for this additional capacity, which it required only for an ‘interim period of 15 days’, even as the FLAG and FALCON cables were being repaired.

Bharti though has dismissed these allegations as totally baseless. When contacted, the Bharti spokesperson said: “We have not received any communication on this subject. In any case, as per policy, we do not comment on any agreement that are bilateral in nature.”

Rcom has been the worst affected as both its cables — FLAG and FALCON — have been cut. The Se-Me-Me-4 cable, on which both Bharti and the Tatas-owned VSNL have capacity was also cut during the same accident, but both these companies were able to minimise the impact and re-route traffic within a few hours through their other cables — Bharti through i2i and VSNL through the Tata Indicom cable and Se-Me-We-3 cables.

It is also learnt that Rcom has sought the intervention of both sector regulator Trai and even the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and requested that the government put in place a framework for industry co-operation and co-ordination which will mandate that undersea cable operators share bandwidth on a cost plus charges during such emergencies. DoT sources said they were looking into Rcom’s complaints. When contacted Rcom officials declined to comment on the issue.

Meanwhile Trai sources said that representatives from both Bharti and Rcom had already met the regulator on the issue. “The regulator had facilitated talks between both companies and the issue has been solved. We intervene only when both companies do not arrive at a solution with regard to bandwidth costs, but in this case, the companies have solved it,” Trai sources added. However, industry sources maintain that the issue was far from solved.

Adding further fuel to the fire, an industry source said that Rcom had been requesting Bharti for additional bandwidth on i2i since November 2007, but the latter had refused citing technical feasibility due to upgrade on its (i2i’s) Chennai-based landing station.

This further complicated matters for RCOM especially after its another undersea cable - FALCON - too broke down near Dubai. and presented difficulties for the ADAG group promoted company to maintain its networks in India, the source said. “Generally the charge is Rs 12 lakh per stpm but Bharti had demanded nearly 10-12 times more charge for the use of its Chennai-based landing station,” the source added.

[copperco2 24]

well doesnt matter how big you are when it comes to making a Quick Million