On Tuesday night, two unrelated undersea cables in the Mediterranean were cut within hours of each other, disrupting Internet and phone service to Egypt and, more significantly, to India, the call center capital of the world.

Howard Marks, Network Computing Blogger

January 31, 2008

1 Min Read

On Tuesday night, two unrelated undersea cables in the Mediterranean were cut within hours of each other, disrupting Internet and phone service to Egypt and, more significantly, to India, the call center capital of the world.So even with supplier, route, and entrance diversity, customers lost connections to their call centers and remote sites until telcos could scramble to re-route traffic to other cables. Some Verizon customers reported problems well into Wednesday morning.

While not as bad as switching to satellite transmission, some applications from Europe to banking centers like Dubai that are now taking the trans-Pacific route may be badly affected by the additional latency.

Just goes to show you. No matter how well you plan, something crops up.

About the Author(s)

Howard Marks

Network Computing Blogger

Howard Marks is founder and chief scientist at Deepstorage LLC, a storage consultancy and independent test lab based in Santa Fe, N.M. and concentrating on storage and data center networking. In more than 25 years of consulting, Marks has designed and implemented storage systems, networks, management systems and Internet strategies at organizations including American Express, J.P. Morgan, Borden Foods, U.S. Tobacco, BBDO Worldwide, Foxwoods Resort Casino and the State University of New York at Purchase. The testing at DeepStorage Labs is informed by that real world experience.

He has been a frequent contributor to Network Computing and InformationWeek since 1999 and a speaker at industry conferences including Comnet, PC Expo, Interop and Microsoft's TechEd since 1990. He is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed (Sams).

He is co-host, with Ray Lucchesi of the monthly Greybeards on Storage podcast where the voices of experience discuss the latest issues in the storage world with industry leaders.  You can find the podcast at: http://www.deepstorage.net/NEW/GBoS

Never Miss a Beat: Get a snapshot of the issues affecting the IT industry straight to your inbox.

You May Also Like


More Insights