The breakage of the three trunk undersea cables in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia has dropped Internet bandwidth between Europe and Asia to 10% of normal capacity, as Telco’s and ISPs frantically try to reroute connections through the USA.

Users in SE Asia are reporting connections as slow as 5 bps with up to 100% transmission packet loss on some browse and email connection attempts.  The disruption to global commerce is only marginally mitigated by the fact the breakage occurred on a Friday with a France Telecom repair ship due on station late on Sunday.

At the time of writing, France Telecom still has no firm explanation of the breakage that affected all three of the trunk cables between Egypt and France, though undersea seismic activity is suspected.  The BBC stated that some seismic activity was reported near Malta, where the break apparently occurred, shortly before the cut was detected this morning. The U.S. Geological Survey recorded a magnitude 5.9 undersea quake in the Northern Mid-Atlantic, about 1,100 miles north-west of Portugal, but it’s not clear whether the two events are connected.

France Telecom has a special section of it’s English language website dedicated to the emergency, where readers can learn about how the repair operations are managed.  For those particularly interested in learning more, they also have a website section dedicated to their marine fleet, the vessels, and the equipment they use.  It too is in English.

Meanwhile  of Bloomberg News reported -

The failures cut the flow of “data of various kinds” between Europe and the Middle East, and there’s no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Reliance Globalcom Ltd. in India. France Telecom SA, which plans to send a maintenance boat to fix the problem, said the situation should be back to normal by Dec. 31.

Three cable systems carrying more than 75 percent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America have been damaged, according to the U.K.’s Interoute Plc, which operates a fiber- optic data network connecting 92 cities. The cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy. In January, an anchor severed the cables outside Alexandria after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast.

“The information we have is a bit sketchy, but chances are that it will have been an anchor again,” Jonathan Wright, Interoute’s director of wholesale products, said in a telephone interview. “Close to 90 percent of all the data traffic between Europe and the Middle East is carried on these three cable systems.”

Interoute said the January incident brought down 70 percent of the Internet network in India and the Middle East.

Further details are emerging.  France Telecom’s Orange mobile-phone unit said the cable failure “greatly disturbed” the traffic between Europe and parts of Asia. At one point as much as 55 percent of voice traffic in Saudi Arabia, 52 percent in Egypt and 82 percent in India was out of service”, they said.

Interoute’s Wright said, “You can re-route the data through other cables, but that increases traffic and can potentially create bottlenecks, so Internet connections may slow down and some phone calls could get disrupted.”  Some of Interoute’s clients in the U.K. and Southern France are probably “affected” by the failure, Wright added.  “It’s difficult to forecast how long it will take to fix the problem as it depends on the weather and sea conditions in the Mediterranean”.

Tech Effects

The fault is affecting the SMW4 cable near the Alexandria cable station, the FLAG FEA cable is down and the SMW3 cable system is also affected, according to information received from Telstra.  Flag Telecom Group Ltd., a Reliance Globalcom unit, operates FLAG FEA and the other cables are owned by groups of phone companies across the regions.  The SMW4 cable, also known as “SEA-ME-WE 4″ or “South East Asia- Middle East-Western Europe 4″ cable network, connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.

France Telecom observed that 3 major underwater cables were cut: “SEA-ME- WE4” at 7:28am, “SEA-ME-WE3” at 7:33am and FLAG at 8:06am. The causes of the cut, which is located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia, on sections linking Sicily to Egypt, remain unclear.  (Times are CET).

Most of the B2B traffic between Europe and Asia is being rerouted through the USA. Traffic from Europe to Algeria and Tunisia is not affected, but traffic from Europe to the Near East and Asia is interrupted to a greater or lesser extent (see country list below).   Part of the internet traffic towards Réunion is affected as well as 50% towards Jordan. A first appraisal at 7:44 am UTC (8:14 GMT / 9:14 CET)) gave an estimate of the following impact on voice traffic (in percentage of out of service capacity):

Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
Djibouti: 71% out of service
Egypt: 52% out of service
United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
India: 82% out of service
Lebanon: 16% out of service
Malaysia: 42% out of service
Maldives: 100% out of service
Pakistan: 51% out of service
Qatar: 73% out of service
Syria: 36% out of service
Taiwan: 39% out of service
Yemen: 38% out of service
Zambia: 62% out of service

VOiP services, such as eBay’s Skype internet telephony service were affected briefly on Friday but appear to have returned to normal on Saturday.

Internet users in Thailand, which routes most of it’s long distance traffic through Malaysia and Singapore, are mixed.  Some users are reporting severe service degradation, others that they are back to normal after a period of disruption on Friday evening.

My own experience is that obtaining a connection to NW European sites is slow and erratic, but once obtained, it is stable and only marginally slower than normal.  Connections to the USA and East Asia are fractionally slower than normal, most likely due to increased traffic flowing in that direction.

Emails however, are badly affected between Thailand and UK servers – many are simply not being pulled from the servers, though this may be related to either dropped transmission packets, or other causes not yet reported.  It is expected they will flow through over time, albeit delayed.

Repair Plans

France Telecom said one of its maintenance boats in the Mediterranean area will cast off tonight at 3:00 local time for a relief mission with 20 kilometers of spare cable on board.  Priority will be to recover the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, then the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable, France Telecom said, adding that SEA-ME-WE4 could be operating by 25th December and that the situation should be back to normal by 31st December.

The repair ship tasked is likely to be the Raymond Croze, a specialised maintenance ship based in La Seyne-sur-mer.  It can put to sea in less than 24 hours for any operation in the Mediterranean, Red Sea or Black Sea in the framework of the MECMA (Mediterranean Cable Maintenance Agreement).

Internet Traffic Report (Asia sector) statistics as of 07:00 GMT 20th December

Asia Summary
Avg. Response Time: 521
Avg. Packet Loss: 29 %
Total Routers: 11
Network up: 72 %