A cut to two undersea communication cables in the Mediterranean Sea caused greatly diminished bandwidth to India on January 30th. You need to consider possible disruptions to communication if you are considering offshore outsourcing.
| The recent headlines about this unfortunate event reminded me of the famous headline reportedly appeared in a British newspaper in the early twentieth century: “Fog in Channel: Continent Cut Off”. Actually, I remember feeling the same way during the first winter I spent after moving to California. A large Sierra snow storm closed Interstate 80 near Lake Tahoe and it seemed the rest of the U.S. was cut off.
So who was cut off from whom? American companies coming to depend on good communication with India also noticed the delays until traffic was re-routed through Pacific connections. |
Image from Telegeography Research |
Meanwhile, a third cable was severed a few days later in the Persian Gulf near Dubai.
An analysis of the impact on modern Internet communications is sobering. Is it a conspiracy?
There isn’t much of an impact on the U.S. and Europe if it is. According to the Analyzing the Internet Collapse article in Technology Review, “This kind of damage is rarely such a deep concern in the United States and Europe. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are crisscrossed so completely with fast fiber networks that a break in one area typically has no significant effect. Net traffic simply uses one of many possible alternate destinations to reach its goal.”
Good thing. I’d hate to think the rest of you could get cut off from California.
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