Remember The Undersea Cables That Were Being Cut ? – Iraqi Ship Held, 2 Arrested

One ship from an Iraqi company is being held and two sailors have been arrested.

DUBAI: The UAE authorities have released one of the two ships allegedly responsible for causing damage to an undersea cable network of Flag Telecom that had resulted in disruption of Internet services across India for two weeks.

The ship was released after a Korean shipping company, which owns it, paid huge compensation to Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Globalcom, as damage, a newspaper reported on Saturday. Read more

Undersea Cables May Have Been Cut By Saboteurs

Damage to several undersea telecom cables that caused outages across the Middle East and Asia could have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union said on Monday.

“We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago,” the UN agency’s head of development, Sami al-Murshed, said. Read more

4th Undersea Cable Break Between Qatar and UAE

In the 4th undersea telecommunications cable to lose connectivity within 3 days across the Middle East, Internet services in Qatar have been seriously disrupted, ensuring ongoing loss of communications across the Middle East from Egypt to India, with the exceptions of US-occupied Iraq, Isratine, Lebanon and Iran.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday the cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE (United Arab Emirates) island of Das on Friday.

The cause of damage is not yet clear, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is related to the power system and not the result of a ship’s anchor cutting the cable, the implausible theory touted by European and American media networks.

Physical breaks to undersea communications cables take at the very least several days and on occasion weeks to repair, due to the technical difficulties involved and requirement of specialized cable ships to reach the scene. Weather, logistics and locations affect the time required to effect a repair.

However damage can be mitigated as in the case of Qatar by finding alternative routes for transmission, where available, and Qatar has so far managed to keep internet capacity at around 60% after taking such measures.

Telecommunications and internet services have been affected in other Gulf countries, UAE’s Etisalat is expected to release a statement on Monday.

Much of the Middle East and West Asia, including the Gulf Arab region, Egypt, Sri Lanka and West India were plunged into a virtual internet blackout since Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast, supplying communications to Europe and North America.

The initial breaches were in segments of two intercontinental cables known as Sea-ME-We-4 and Flag Europe-Asia, run by British company FLAG telecom.

Read More

Third Undersea Internet Cable Damaged in Mideast

1st Cable Cut – “What’s the back up plan?”

2nd Cable Cut – “What’s going on here?”

3rd Cable Cut – “What are the odds of this being a simple coincidence?”

Update 02/04/08 – A 4th Cable Is Now Being Reported Cut Story Link

Update 02/03/08 – No Ships Were Present When Cable Cut

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East’s internet traffic were severed, Egypt’s Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.

The ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor on the two key cables was most likely responsible for Wednesday’s cut in service that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of most of their internet connections.

“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,” said the statement. Read more