Re: Sicily to Egypt undersea cable disruption

["Martin Hannigan" <hannigan () gmail com>]

On Jan 30, 2008 9:41 PM, Todd Underwood <todd-nanog () renesys com> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 01:56:42AM +0000, Paul Ferguson wrote:
> > For what its worth, Todd Underwood has a very good overview of the
> > countries affected by this outage over on the Renesys Blog here:
> >
> > http://www.renesys.com/blog/2008/01/mediterranean_cable_break.shtml
>
> while i very much appreciate the compliment, this work was all done by
> my colleagues at renesys earl zmijewski and alin popescu.  i've been
> following the routing events around this cable break, though.
>
> there are some interesting findings here about who (what carriers,
> what countries) were critically dependant on these cable systems.

In the Med/IO cable case, a ship dropped an anchor on the cable,
something that is 1:1,000,000 shot, but happens. At least they know
where it is. The failure to contract the maintenance ship tighter on a
route that turns out to be "that vulnerable" is probably of concer for
users of that cable now as well. A lot of the impact is likely also
due to people not buying protect circuits or bothering to understand
the IP architecture. That is something that is becoming common
globally, IMHO. Folks assume that IP will route around the damage.
Sure it will, if all the physical layer paths aren't busted. Layer 1
really does "rock".

Watching BGP announcements seems "less important" in these erious
performance impacting cases, to me, than understanding the underlying
architecture and what the root cause a half step above the anchor and
a half a step below the advertisement was.

Looking forward to Rod Beck's response. :-)


Best,

Marty