The internet connectivity is restored completely. The maintenance event of SEA-ME-WE 4 impacted the internet connectivity of South East Asia for Europe and Regions of North America.
Brief about SEA-ME-WE 4:
The South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4 submarine communications cable system OR SEA-ME-WE 4 is a consortium of 16 companies (including Airtel and Tata Communications) which carries telecommunications between Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.
ROOT Cause For the Maintenance Event:
The SEA-ME-WE 4 cable linking Europe with the Middle East and South Asia was cut on Wednesday, 14th April in the Mediterranean Sea and became inoperable due to a “shunt fault” approximately 1,886 kilometers from Alexandria towards Palermo, Italy in the S4 section of the cable. A shunt fault occurs when the submarine cable insulation becomes damaged and a short circuit occurs when it comes into contact with water. The repairs took an outage of 4 days Due to the shunt fault the SEA-ME-WE-4 was operating with limited capacity.
During the activity all the west bound traffic for Europe and US was shut down resulting in higher latency but not the blackout due to redundancy.
Who Suffered during the event:
Service providers like Airtel and Tata Communications (who bears a strong hold in SEA-ME-WE 4) were impacted. Traffic took longer path which resulted in increase the route distance hence the latency and heavy bandwidth usage.
As per SEACOM they experienced a brief interruption in their network on 14 April 2010 as a result of a fault on the Mediterranean section of the SEA-ME-WE 4 submarine cable system, which SEACOM currently utilizes to connect to London.
SEA-ME-WE 4, which stretches from South East Asia to Europe via the Indian Sub-Continent and Middle East, underwent repairs on Saturday 24 April 2010 upto 29 April to fix the affected fibre pair in the Mediterranean Sea.
According to SEACOM this process is carried out by a repair ship. It was deployed to the location of the fault where they pick up the cable, cut it and bring it onboard to undergo the repair on the optic fibre before the cable is placed back in the water. The power was shut down on the cable for the duration of the repair. The process took much longer than expected, something which SEACOM indicated is beyond their control. “Due to ongoing maintenance activity on another cable network servicing Africa and poor weather in the Mediterranean Sea, the actual work only began on Sunday 25 April 2010
The ongoing repair work affected several cable systems impacting negatively on the overall Internet connectivity in many regions across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, which rely on the availability of the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable for global connectivity.
The fault has now been repaired and internet connectivity has finally been restored to Europe and West cost of US.
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Hey, where do get this info from.. is there a website/maillist or rss feeds from where we could stay updated on such outages,
thanks in advance,
Joel
I received an email fro m my internet provider which drew my curiosity.