There were numerous headlines over the last couple of weeks about the problems with Internet access in India due to a cable cut. Basically, one of the Fibre Optic lines serving India and the Middle East was severed resulting in reduced Internet service across the entire geography. This brings up an interesting issue. It is amazing that today’s telecom infrasctructure is still so fragile that a single cable cut can have such an impact. Ironically, the original design of the TCP/IP protocol was to allow networks to recover from these kinds of problems. One would hope that we would have enough bandwidth and redundancy to prevent these kinds of problems.
I ran into an Internet that discusses the above cut. Interestingly, it indicates that the problems were all caused by a ship dropping anchor during a storm and severing/damaging the cable. It is amazing that such a simple thing could have such an impact.