Like cheap shipping, finger-thin Internet cables take sea route

The foundation for a connected world seems quite fragile, an impression reinforced this week when a break in two cables in the Mediterranean Sea disrupted communications across the Middle East and into India and neighbouring countries.

Yet the network itself is fairly resilient. In fact, cables are broken all the time, usually by fishing lines and ship anchors, and few of us notice. It takes a confluence of factors for a cable break to cause an outage.

“Most Telecom companies have capacity at multiple systems, so if one goes out, they simply reroute to a different system,” said Stephan Beckert, analyst at research firm TeleGeography in Washington. “It’s just that in this case, both the main route and the back-up route got cut for a lot of companies.”

The two cables — FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 — were cut on the ocean floor just north of Alexandria, Egypt.

The slim fibre-optic cables that carry the world’s communications are much like ships, in that they’re the cheapest way for carrying things over long distances. Pulling cable overland is much more expensive and requires negotiation with landowners and governments.

So fiber-optic cables that go from Europe to India take the sea route via Egypt’s Suez Canal, just as ships do.

Another Mediterranean cable makes land not far away, in Israel.

But there’s no cable overland from Israel into Jordan and to the Persian Gulf, which could have provided a redundant connection for the Gulf States and India. Going overland would have been more expensive and politically difficult — Israel and Arab countries would have to cooperate.

There is also no route that goes through Russia, Iran and Pakistan to India.