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A fourth submarine cable may have been damaged on Sunday, this time in the Persian Gulf, although some news reports total only three damaged cables. The cable links Qatar (left), to the United Arab Emirates (right), and caused yet more disruptions, telecommunication provider Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said today.

Telegeography also says it’s the fourth such incident in less than a week.

UPDATE: Now a total of five cables being operated by two submarine cable operators have been reported damaged, reports the Khaleej Times. The latest is the SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) cable near Penang, Malaysia. Previous cable breaks include (1) the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, (2) FLAG near the Dubai coast, (3) FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and (4) SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.

Two days earlier in the Persian Gulf, the FALCON cable was cut at 0559 hrs GMT on February 1 2008, on a segment between UAE and Oman, 56 kms from Dubai. It is also under investigation. Flag Telecom on Monday played down conspiracy theories, but a spokesperson admitted it did seem like a bit of a coincidence that all four were damaged within such a short space of time. Blog Runner and Google News have the latest on the cable breaks in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.

Al Jazeera (wikipedia) — coincidently — is headquartered in Doha, Qatar (live video) while Dubai Internet City is an information technology park created by the Government of Dubai as a free economic zone. Major companies which have established operations at DIC include Microsoft, IBM, Oracle Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, HP, Nokia and Siemens, as well as UAE based companies such as i-mate, Acette and many others.

The latest cable damage occured between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, Qtel’s head of communications Adel Al Mutawa said and reported in the Khaleej Times. But the Khaleej Times says it is only the third incident of its kind in the area since the cables were first damaged in the Mediterranean and then off the coast of Dubai.

Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean, two submarine cables (global map), are also out of commission. They are operated by Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, and SEA-ME-WEA 4, run by a consortium of 16 telecommunications companies.

The two cables are about a quarter-mile apart. Egypt’s Ministry of Communications now says ships are not responsible for damaging undersea internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea.

The ministry had originally stated that a ship dropping its anchor was most likely responsible for Wednesday’s cuts that robbed Egypt, Saudi Arabia and India of most of their internet connections.

Net traffic is funneled along narrow routes. Breaks aren’t unusual. More than 50 repair operations were mounted in the Atlantic alone last year, according to marine cable repair company Global Marine Systems.

But Egypt’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority said footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the location of the cables showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.

“The ministry’s maritime transport committee reviewed footage covering the period of 12 hours before and 12 hours after the cables were cut and no ships sailed the area,” a statement said. “The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships.”

The Khaleej Times reported that it caused minor disruptions to the Etisalat network (wikipedia), while the second telecom operator in the UAE, Du, said its network was not affected by this fresh cable damage.

The rash of submarine cable breaks began when two cables were damaged in the Mediterranean Sea and a third off the coast of Dubai linking to Oman, in the Persian Gulf. It caused widespread disruption to internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and South Asia.

The cause of the damage is not yet known. A repair ship is expected to begin work to fix the two Mediterranean cables on Tuesday.

A ship is waiting in Abu Dhabi port to fix a break in the FALCON cable, cut off the coast of Dubai on Friday. But bad weather has prevented any ships to sail, FLAG said in its latest update at 0600 GMT on Feb. 2.

The main competitor of Reliance Communication, VSNL said on Friday it had restored a majority of its internet connectivity into the Middle East and South Asia by routing traffic to other SEA-ME-WE cables, off Egypt.

The Internet Traffic Report monitors the flow of data around the world and displays a value between zero and 100. Right now, Iran is rated “zero”. But this report may be based on pings to a single router in Iran and does not indicate that the entire Internet has ceased to function there, says the Renesys blog. Apparently, Iran is not suffering much more than neighboring countries.

The major cables that tie India with the rest of the world are SEA-ME-WE 3 and SEA-ME-WE 4 (South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe), FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe), 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 (BSNL).

In January 2004, India’s Reliance Communications paid US$ 211 million, or 6 cents on the dollar for FLAG (the Fiber Optic Link Around the Globe).

In 2005, India’s Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) acquired the Tyco Global Network (TGN) from Tyco international for $130 million. The $130 million purchase price for TGN translates to roughly 5 cents on the dollar. The chief stockholder in VSNL is India’s Tata Group, also that country’s largest offshore outsourcing company. Tyco’s Transpacific cable has a capacity of some 6.7 Terabits/second.

KMI monthly reviewed planned submarine cable plants.

Project Month awarded Route length Supplier(s)
Greenland Connect December 4,600 km Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
TGN-Intra Asia November 6,000 km (est.) Tyco Telecommunications
TEAMS November 4,700 km Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
ACS Alaska-Oregon October 3,200 km (est.) Tyco Telecommunications
MENA Mediterranean October 3,850 km Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
Alaska United October 1,220 km NEC
Paniolo Fiber-Optic Cable (PFOC) October 450 km IT
Seaton Anderson Lake Project (SALP) October 44 km IT
Caucasus Online September 1,100 km Tyco Telecommunications
COMETA September 480 km Nexans
FLAG NGN 1 September 5,000 km Fujitsu
FLAG NGN 3 September 5,000 km Fujitsu
SEACOM July 13,000 km Tyco Telecommunications
MIC 1 July 70 km Global Marine
CFX-1 May 2,400 km Tyco Telecommunications
Newfoundland-Nova Scotia May 800 km IT, Nexans
Asia-America Gateway (AAG) April 20,000 km NEC, Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
EASSy March 10,000 km Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
Sydney-Hawaii March 9,000 km Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
Matrix February 1,350 km Tyco Telecommunications
Minerva February 500 km (est.) Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks
La Gomera-El Hierro (Canary Islands) January 145 km Tyco Telecommunications
SHEFA-2 January 700 km NSW, IT, Xtera
Trinidad-Curacao Sub Sea Fibre Project January 1,000 km Tyco Telecommunications
Trans Pacific Express (TPE) January 18,000 km Tyco Telecommunications
Total   112,609 km  

Unidentified vessels are science fiction. You can track the current position of dozens of Cableships of the World. The Coast Guard’s Maritime Information Exchange also allows you to search for a particular vessel by using one or more search criteria. It appears as though just about any ship can likely be tracked and identified using a combination of radio signals, acoustic tracking and satellite interception.

A 4.8 earthquake was recorded on Saturday, February 02, 2008 at 26.423°N, 52.956°E, about 10 km in depth (6.2 miles) in the PERSIAN GULF, 190 km (120 miles) NE of DOHA, Qatar.

Here’s the Historic Seismicity of the Persian Gulf region. You can also browse the free online tsunami database.

Submarine cables that land on the West Coast of the United States have a variety of owners. VSNL acquired the Tyco Global Network in 2005 and their TGN Pacific connects several U.S. west coast exchanges directly to Japan, then onward into Asia. Others include, Trans-Pacific-1 (to Japan), Southern Cross (to Australia), Trans-Pacific Cable 5 (to Japan), China-US (to China), Japan-US (to Japan), and Trans-Pacific Express (to China & South Korea). The new TGN-Intra Asia submarine cable will link Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan with an additional connection to the Philippines, and potentially Vietnam.

DailyWireless has more on the Mediterranean cable cuts, Fiber Crosses the Pond and Ring of Fire Earthquakes.

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