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.

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.

Posted by Sam Churchill on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 9:17 pm.