So we’ve seen three cable systems fail this week. I work for a major Australian telecoms company that sells amongst other things, capacity on these cable systems. Good old SMW3 is holding on well even though its newer, more robust cousin SMW4 has fallen over. The trouble with international Internet comms is that it all fires down a handful of cables.
The days when we all envisaged a Borg-like mesh of cables spanning the globe or a handful of major players providing competitive rates for core backbone have largely fizzled away into memory. Instead, a few consortium build cables and sell capacity to other providers who in turn resell or provide direct Internet and private services over them.
If you want to get to Asia from Europe fast, you’ve really got to be considering SMW4 but as it is unprotected, SMW3 capacity is needed as well to provide some resilience. Luckily in this case, the thinking behind making SMW3 and SMW4 take slightly different routes has paid off. FLAG and FALCON unfortunately aren’t on the same plan.
Of course if the mysterious “ship anchor” or whatever it is takes out SMW3 as well then many countries may see the Internet disappear or become unusable altogether.
Keep everything crossed and spare a thought for those guys on the cabling ships in freezing cold seas working hard so that your Facebook account becomes available again.
