Internet Asia-Africa-Europe-1 The cable travels 15,500 miles along the seabed, connecting Hong Kong with Marseille, France. As it travels across the South China Sea and into Europe, the cable helps provide internet connectivity to more than a dozen countries, from India to Greece. When the cable is cut on June 7Millions of people have taken it offline and faced temporary Internet connection loss.
The cable, also known as AAE-1, was severed as it went overland through Egypt. Another cable was also damaged in the incident, the cause of the damage is unknown. However, the impact is immediate. “It has affected about seven countries and several leading services,” said Rosalind Thomas, chief executive officer of SAEx International Management, which has plans to plans to create a new undersea cable connecting Africa, Asia and the US. “The worst was Ethiopia, which lost 90% of the connection and Somalia after that also 85%.” Cloud services belong to GoogleAmazon and Microsoft are both disrupted, next analysis disclosure.
While connectivity was restored within hours, the outage highlights the fragility of more than 550 undersea internet cables around the world, plus the overwhelming role Egypt and the nearby Red Sea play for the facility. internet infrastructure. The global network of underwater cables forms a large part of the backbone of the internet, carrying much of the data around the world and ultimately linking to the networks that power cell towers and Wi-Fi connections. Underground cables connect New York to London and Australia to Los Angeles.
Sixteen of these submarine cables — usually no thicker than a hose and susceptible to damage from moorings and earthquakes — traverse 1,200 miles through the Red Sea before they cross overland in Egypt and reach the Mediterranean Sea. Mediterranean Sea, connecting Europe with Asia. The past two decades have seen the route emerge as one of the world’s largest Internet connection points and arguably the most vulnerable place on Earth. (The region, including the Suez Canal, is also a global bottleneck for shipping and freight. Chaos ensued as container ship Already given stuck in the channel in 2021.)
“Where there is a bottleneck, there is a single point of failure,” said Nicole Starosielski, an associate professor of media, culture and communications at New York University and an author on submarine cables. “Because this is such a highly concentrated location of global movements, that makes it more vulnerable than many parts of the world.”
This area has also recently been brought to the attention of the European Parliament, which in a June report highlighted it as a risk for widespread internet disruption. “The most important bottleneck for the EU concerns travel between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean via the Red Sea as the core connection to Asia runs through this route,” the report said. Extremism and maritime terrorism are risks in the region.
Pyramid Diagram
Look at Egypt on the undersea internet cable map of the world and it immediately became clear why internet professionals have been interested in this area for so many years. The 16 cables in the area converged through the Red Sea and hit the ground in Egypt, where they made a 100-mile journey across the country to the Mediterranean Sea. (The cable map does not show the exact location of the cable.)
It is estimated that about 17% of internet traffic in the world traveled along these cables and passed through Egypt. Alan Mauldin, research director at telecoms market research firm TeleGeography, said last year the region had 178 terabits, or 178,000,000 Mbps — US has average home internet speed is 167 Mbps.
