January 8, 2018 at 18:58“Not Again, But Again”: The Sea-Me-We 3 submarine cable failed for the second time in a year
In early December, it became known that the Sea-Me-We 3 submarine telecommunications cable, which provides communication between the countries of Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Western Europe, once again failed . The problem was felt in Asia and Australia .
We deal with what happened. / photo Official US Navy Page CC
Sea-Me-We 3 (South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3) is an optical submarine telecommunication cable connecting three regions of the world. It was commissioned in 2000 and is the longest and one of the oldest systems of its kind.
The history of this route began in 1985 with the first generation of Sea-Me-We. Its length was 13.5 thousand km. The second generation - 18.7 thousand km. It was the longest in the world at the time of commissioning in 1994.
In 1993, Singapore Telecom and France Telecom operators conducted preliminary studies to lay a new cable with high bandwidth that would connect Europe with the Asia-Pacific region. In 1994, 16 parties agreed to work on the Sea-Me-We 3 project on a stretch between Western Europe and Singapore. In 1996, the system was expanded to a section from Singapore to the Far East and Australia. In 1997, an agreement on the construction and maintenance of Sea-Me-We 3 was signed by 92 international telecommunications companies.
Over the entire period of its existence, the Sea-Me-We 3 cable with a length of 39 thousand km was modernized several times. The last update was made in 2015 to introduce 100G technology.
Accidents in different areas of Sea-Me-We 3 have occurred before. Last casewas captured by Vocus Communications, which owns the Sea-Me-We 3 cable system between Perth (Australia) and Singapore. The incident occurred at a distance of 1.1 thousand km from the cable maintenance post in Singapore. A repair ship has been assigned to restore communications . If everything goes according to plan, and the weather on the site does not deteriorate, they plan to fix the problem before January 9, 2018. During the repair, traffic will be redistributed over other communication lines.
The story of Sea-Me-We 3's global crashes began in 2008 when it crashed along with two other cables. In 2011, the gap occurred on a site in the Suez Canal, Egypt. In 2014, a malfunction occurredbetween Singapore and Indonesia.
In the following years, problems became more frequent - the only cable directly connecting Perth and Singapore stopped working twice in 2015 with short interruptions. A serious gap occurred at the end of August 2017 due to two typhoons in Southeast Asia. The cable was restored only in October.
The causes of many malfunctions were not announced. While ship anchors, people, and even sharks can become the culprits of the breaks , it should be borne in mind that SEA-ME-WE 3 passes through the so-called zone of the "ring of fire" , in the perimeter of which the largest number of earthquakes on the planet occur. howexplains Clement Teo, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, to get the cable to bypass this zone will require much more money than it takes to resolve incidents.
One of the causes of problems is during cable laying after repair. The fact is that cables “ accumulate ” a layer of protective sludge when immersed in water, but for several weeks and months after repair, they remain vulnerable to anchors, underwater earthquakes and other risk factors.
The global problem Sea-Me-We 3 is the state in which the cable is located after 17 years of operation. The head of Vocus International, Luke Mackinnon (Luke Mackinnon), commenting on the latest malfunction, saidthat the life cycle of the system is drawing to a close. He called this system “fragile” and added that “Australia needs more reliable alternatives with more bandwidth.”
Each time, ordinary users suffer from gaps - the speed of access to a number of Internet resources slows down. As alternatives to the Sea-Me-We 3 outage, operators are looking for nearby routes, directing traffic through the US or Hong Kong . However, Australia does not rely solely on a sophisticated emergency routing system.
/ photo The Official CTBTO Photostream CC
To ensure greater bandwidth and meet growing user demand, route maintenance was partially transferred to Sea-Me-We 4 and Sea-Me-We 5. They were launched in 2005 and 2017, respectively.
The length of Sea-Me-We 4 is about 18.8 thousand km. It provides a connectionbetween Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe, complementing Sea-Me-We 3. The two cable systems are complementary. Sea-Me-We 4 has a higher data transfer rate: 1.280 Gbit / s versus 960 Gbit / s for Sea-Me-We 3. The
main task of Sea-Me-We 4 is to meet the growing demand for high-speed Internet access in developing countries . Like the main cable, the Sea-Me-We 4 is prone to malfunction. During its existence, it crashed more than 10 times.
Sea-Me-We 5 was launched in early 2017. Its length is about 20 thousand km. Its design throughput is 24 Tbps. It also connects the countries of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
The latest breakup of Sea-Me-We 3 was the reason for discussing another project - Australia Singapore Cable (ASC). This is a 4.6 thousand km submarine cable system connecting Perth with Singapore via Indonesia. Part of the ASC will be laid in such a way as to avoid the gaps that have accompanied Sea-Me-We 3 over the past 10 years.
A new cable will be laid up to four meters from the seabed between Singapore and Christmas Island. Cable launch is expected in July 2018. ASC design capacity is 40 Tbps.
Failure of cable systems seriously damages intercontinental communications and makes access to global web services difficult. 99% of all traffic passes through the oceans via submarine cables. Large gaps in several lines at once create problems for millions of users, and the losses from such incidents are estimated at more than a million dollars, provided that the fault can be resolved in two weeks. In this case, only direct costs are taken into account.
Here are the accidents with cable systems in the oceans over the past 12 months:
PS A few more materials from our corporate blog:
We deal with what happened. / photo Official US Navy Page CC
What is this cable
Sea-Me-We 3 (South-East Asia - Middle East - Western Europe 3) is an optical submarine telecommunication cable connecting three regions of the world. It was commissioned in 2000 and is the longest and one of the oldest systems of its kind.
The history of this route began in 1985 with the first generation of Sea-Me-We. Its length was 13.5 thousand km. The second generation - 18.7 thousand km. It was the longest in the world at the time of commissioning in 1994.
In 1993, Singapore Telecom and France Telecom operators conducted preliminary studies to lay a new cable with high bandwidth that would connect Europe with the Asia-Pacific region. In 1994, 16 parties agreed to work on the Sea-Me-We 3 project on a stretch between Western Europe and Singapore. In 1996, the system was expanded to a section from Singapore to the Far East and Australia. In 1997, an agreement on the construction and maintenance of Sea-Me-We 3 was signed by 92 international telecommunications companies.
Over the entire period of its existence, the Sea-Me-We 3 cable with a length of 39 thousand km was modernized several times. The last update was made in 2015 to introduce 100G technology.
Accidents in different areas of Sea-Me-We 3 have occurred before. Last casewas captured by Vocus Communications, which owns the Sea-Me-We 3 cable system between Perth (Australia) and Singapore. The incident occurred at a distance of 1.1 thousand km from the cable maintenance post in Singapore. A repair ship has been assigned to restore communications . If everything goes according to plan, and the weather on the site does not deteriorate, they plan to fix the problem before January 9, 2018. During the repair, traffic will be redistributed over other communication lines.
The story of Sea-Me-We 3's global crashes began in 2008 when it crashed along with two other cables. In 2011, the gap occurred on a site in the Suez Canal, Egypt. In 2014, a malfunction occurredbetween Singapore and Indonesia.
In the following years, problems became more frequent - the only cable directly connecting Perth and Singapore stopped working twice in 2015 with short interruptions. A serious gap occurred at the end of August 2017 due to two typhoons in Southeast Asia. The cable was restored only in October.
The causes of many malfunctions were not announced. While ship anchors, people, and even sharks can become the culprits of the breaks , it should be borne in mind that SEA-ME-WE 3 passes through the so-called zone of the "ring of fire" , in the perimeter of which the largest number of earthquakes on the planet occur. howexplains Clement Teo, a senior analyst at Forrester Research, to get the cable to bypass this zone will require much more money than it takes to resolve incidents.
One of the causes of problems is during cable laying after repair. The fact is that cables “ accumulate ” a layer of protective sludge when immersed in water, but for several weeks and months after repair, they remain vulnerable to anchors, underwater earthquakes and other risk factors.
The global problem Sea-Me-We 3 is the state in which the cable is located after 17 years of operation. The head of Vocus International, Luke Mackinnon (Luke Mackinnon), commenting on the latest malfunction, saidthat the life cycle of the system is drawing to a close. He called this system “fragile” and added that “Australia needs more reliable alternatives with more bandwidth.”
Alternatives to Sea-Me-We 3
Each time, ordinary users suffer from gaps - the speed of access to a number of Internet resources slows down. As alternatives to the Sea-Me-We 3 outage, operators are looking for nearby routes, directing traffic through the US or Hong Kong . However, Australia does not rely solely on a sophisticated emergency routing system.
/ photo The Official CTBTO Photostream CC
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To ensure greater bandwidth and meet growing user demand, route maintenance was partially transferred to Sea-Me-We 4 and Sea-Me-We 5. They were launched in 2005 and 2017, respectively.
The length of Sea-Me-We 4 is about 18.8 thousand km. It provides a connectionbetween Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe, complementing Sea-Me-We 3. The two cable systems are complementary. Sea-Me-We 4 has a higher data transfer rate: 1.280 Gbit / s versus 960 Gbit / s for Sea-Me-We 3. The
main task of Sea-Me-We 4 is to meet the growing demand for high-speed Internet access in developing countries . Like the main cable, the Sea-Me-We 4 is prone to malfunction. During its existence, it crashed more than 10 times.
Sea-Me-We 5 was launched in early 2017. Its length is about 20 thousand km. Its design throughput is 24 Tbps. It also connects the countries of Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe.
The latest breakup of Sea-Me-We 3 was the reason for discussing another project - Australia Singapore Cable (ASC). This is a 4.6 thousand km submarine cable system connecting Perth with Singapore via Indonesia. Part of the ASC will be laid in such a way as to avoid the gaps that have accompanied Sea-Me-We 3 over the past 10 years.
A new cable will be laid up to four meters from the seabed between Singapore and Christmas Island. Cable launch is expected in July 2018. ASC design capacity is 40 Tbps.
What cables still failed in 2017
Failure of cable systems seriously damages intercontinental communications and makes access to global web services difficult. 99% of all traffic passes through the oceans via submarine cables. Large gaps in several lines at once create problems for millions of users, and the losses from such incidents are estimated at more than a million dollars, provided that the fault can be resolved in two weeks. In this case, only direct costs are taken into account.
Here are the accidents with cable systems in the oceans over the past 12 months:
- At the end of 2016, the submarine cable that served the Marshall Islands in the Pacific was damaged , as a result of which Internet access was limited by email to 53 thousand residents. Repair work continued in early January 2017.
- The dropped ship’s anchor also stopped the operation of three submarine cables serving the English Channel in the run-up to the onset of 2017.
- At the very beginning of the year, Bangladesh suffered from the effects of a December cyclone in the Indian Ocean, which damaged one of the Indian submarine cables.
- In June , the capital of the Republic of Congo, Brazzaville, network outages were recorded due to damage to the main submarine cables in the region.
- In the same month, an accident on the MainOne cable system, 3 thousand km from the coast of Portugal, led to problems in servicing the people of Africa.
- MainOne submarine cable provides connectivity between Europe and several West African countries.
- In addition to Sea-Me-We 3, Asia Submarine-cable Express (ASE), Asia-American Gateway (AAG) and TGA-Intra Asia (TGA-IA) were affected by typhoons . ASE is an intra-Asian submarine cable system, while AAG connects Southeast Asia with the mainland of the United States through the islands of Guam and Hawaii. At AAG often arise problems.
- Another fault occurred on the IMEWE submarine cable line, which connects India and Europe through the Middle East. As a result, there has been a serious slowdown in Internet connection speeds in Pakistan.
PS A few more materials from our corporate blog: