A Hole In the Net, Down Under

cjm_in_oz writes: "Since 4pm yesterday, Australia's leading ISP has lost 60% of its bandwidth due to either an earthquake, or as is more likely, a ship's anchor. Read more here ." Most of the entire continent's bandwidth, you see, courses through a particular manhole ... sheesh. This sure sounds like an argument for more and more fiber, along different courses.

Re:Here is the Link

from the article:

"...circumstantial evidence suggests this species is a member of the DSL community..."

Mmmmm, high-bandwidth sharks...

The outage is 60% of Telstra, not Australia!

Just to clarify the point, the cable that has been cut has resulted in a 60% loss in capacity for Telstra. Telstra happens to be the biggest provider of Internet access for Australia, but it is not the only provider, there are others, eg Optus. So while Telstra customers are experiencing slow Internet access, us people on Optus are experiencing no such delays.

And a couple of additional bits of information:

• Telstra doesn't have any connection to the new fat pipe to the US - Optus does.
• Telstra has restored capacity to approximately 75% by rerouting traffic through satellites

They have limited bandwidth.. and what happens..

When an ISP is operating under limited bandwidth, the LAST thing you want to do is POST A STORY ON SLASHDOT POINTING TO A WEB SERVER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PIPE, restricting said bandwidth even further. *sigh*

This is great!

Some drunk, old and likely insane freighter captain decides to drop anchor 100 miles out to sea and accidentally kicks half the world in the nuts. I guess even the little people still have some power... :D
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poor guys

I work for a medium size telco doing backbone work.

I can just imagine what a pain in the ass this will be to fix!

For those who are unfamiliar with SONET fiber technology:

You have to understand that for most companies, (until just recently), SONET is set up in a dual ring configuration. This is somewhat analogous to FDDI in a Lan. There are generally 4 fibers between offices, 2 per cable, (transmit and recieve). If you get backhoe fade on one cable, the signal gets transferred to the other cable's transmit and recieve. To set up a star type topography has traditionally been cost prohibitive, and is not done too often.

Although the internet is highly redundant on the IP level, most of continental and international traffic is jammed onto a few huge capacity strands of fiber to save money.

One cable cut in a long haul situation can quite possibly be disastorous in many areas of the world. I imagine Australia, being an island in the middle of nowhere, (internet wise), can't have too many redundant links.

Just a thought

"Redundancy" is commonly a myth...

To expand on what was mentioned earlier about redundacy a bit...

Redundancy in the telecom world takes on two basic forms - equipment redundancy and circuit redundancy.

Equipment redundancy is pretty much what it says - redundant equipment in place with the same end service in mind. Should a processor in a fiber multiplexer die, fry, go up in smoke, whatever, the equipment fails over to the backup processor with little or no interruption of service. This is more or less a minimum standard in the telecom world.

Then there is circuit redundancy, which takes two more basic forms, either over a single cable (with multiple fiber strands), or over multiple cables. Unfortunately, more often than not in more "rural" areas, this is usually multiple fiber redundancy within a single cable. Which covers almost all equipment failures involving the physical cable interface, but does nothing at all for when Joe-Backhoe-Operator digs without a locate and tears up 15 feet of cable without even noticing it. Which is the most common failure I've experienced.

Even multiple cables isn't always the answer, especially if the physical routes aren't diverse enough. I can think of two instances, both in the upper midwest, where multiple cables in proximity (read - one or more conduits in a very small space) were damaged or destroyed, once by fire, and another by a vandal who knew where to find them.

The ideal situation is for telephone companies to have two routes out to the "network" running in almost opposite directions. However, again, although this works well for switched voice calls, most of the time it doesn't work for "nailed up" point to point circuits, which still leaves those types of circuits, commonly used by ISP's where frame relay isn't available, in the cold when routes are destroyed. And, we all know how fragile frame relay can be, especially when Worldcom is at the helm - "Oh, let's just globally upgrade the software in our network without any phasing or large scale testing at all. Oh, yeah, and when it falls on it's nose, let's let it fester for a week or so before we get the network to re-converge."

So, there you have it in a nutshell. Nothing is foolproof, especially if you don't own or control all of the network from point to point. But, I think most everyone would agree, there are very few times I've ever picked up the phone and not had dialtone. I think most people in the states would agree with that. Remember, the telephone network is the most complicated, expensive, diverse, available electronic network in the world. And although the phone companies are far from perfect, especially the former US West and Worldcom, when you think about it, it's really amazing how stable it is, and that it works as well as it does!

Brad

Qwest cuts AT&T too...

How about c|net's story off of the ap: Qwest ordered to pay AT&T $350M [cnet.com] for repeatedly cutting a fiber-optic phone line.

And now...

the available bandwidth will decrease even more as sites in Australia are Slashdotted by everyone checking this out.

my insightful flamebait

Please read article before posting story.

The damaged cable does not usually handle "Most of the entire continent's bandwidth...." It handle 60% of a particular company's bandwidth, which is very different.

And this event does illustrate the need for more connections. The story also explains that there are more connections, including a new cable with 5x the bandwidth of the one damaged. Unfortunately, that new cable is owned by a different company which is not experience technical difficulties.


My mom is not a Karma whore!

Re:Big pipe?

a large fraction of Australia's traffic is carried by Telstra, the partly government-owned telco, who aren't yet using that big, fat, redundant connection. Telstra customers (both direct and indirect as their ISP's use Telstra's backbone) were the ones affected.

This made the newspapers (at least in a minor way) here, and believe me, there's a lot of unhappy people. I'd imagine that Telstra might well be leasing some space on that big, redundant connection in the not-too-distant future :)

i'm sorry

One seaworthy vessel; ten million dollars

A solid steel anchor; two thousand dollars

Whoring for karma with bad Mastercard ripoffs; priceless

There are some things having a life can't get you. 87 Karma is one of them.

User's experience

In Oz, as a Telstra customer last night, data rates to the US were down to a few hundred bytes per second (assuming you could successfully connect at all), and ping times were up to ~5000 msec. Thankfully, I didn't have any big up/downloads that needed doing. Things have improved today - ping times are back to normal and bandwidth is up to ~5-6 kilobytes per second (I'm on a cable modem).

How is it for others in the region? All we've heard so far is Australian reports, but this outage will unfortunately be affecting people throughout Asia :(

Timothy, puhlease...

Try not to be such a patronising twat. You make Australia sound like some kind of backwater that's up there with the places they have more guns than food.

• Most of the entire continent's bandwidth, you see, courses through a particular manhole ... sheesh

Read the article, and you'll see:

• Other ISPs and networks such as Optus were uncongested.

Yes, Timothy, we do have more than one ISP out here. And I believe Telstra carries a minority of traffic (given they're over 100% times more expensive than other bandwidth providers). Anyone that has someone like Optus or uuNet (my ISP has redundant links to both) as their upstream would not have been any more affected by this than your typical American (some Aussie sites may have been down).

you fools!!!

Can't you realize what's happening?! Look at the moon tonight! LOOK AT IT! Can't you see that the light reflected off its dark side is an indicator that an asteroid has hit Australia, and is emitting a fireball brighter than the sun? THIS COULD MEAN THE END oh wait that's a streetlamp outside, never mind.

So that's what it was...

I thought I was having a flashback to when pr0n arraived at 2400 baud...

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Now ain't that suspicious

Only a week ago a competing company fired up a new link.. Now suddenly their only competition has their wire cut. Hmm. Sounds like a good way to acquire customers for that new expensive link, -- while permanently destroying your competition.

Sounds like what they were talking about in Cryptonomicon, cable cutting wars. Easy to start, but nobody dares start them.