It is not yet clear what caused the damage Wednesday to two submarine fiber optic cables off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast but the impact appears to have been considerable. Web access throughout the Middle East and India has been widely disrupted and international telephone calls were also affected as phone companies worked to find spare capacity on other networks.
First estimates are that it may take at least a week to find and repair the damaged cables. The impact of millions of businesses and home users of the Internet and phone system is likely to be considerable, both in inconvenience and economic cost. One conspicuous casualty has been India’s call-center industry, which having lost around half of its bandwidth is struggling to service clients in the UK and United States.
In the past three days, the corporate world has grappled with the commercial implications of this disruption while domestic users have been fuming at their inability to quickly update their Facebook profiles or download pirated movies and software. From a policy perspective, it must be hoped that governments and communications experts are taking note of the lessons that need to be learned from this event. The most obvious is that the physical undersea cable networks that carry massive flows of data every minute have to be designed and built with additional lines. As it is, much of the world is interconnected with numerous alternate routes, especially across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States and East Asia. But, as Wednesday’s cut of two key cables showed, other parts of the world are less connected to the World Wide Web. How connected a region is to the Internet can clearly be used as a benchmark of the region’s development. For example, setting aside the North African Region — which borders and benefits from a key information superhighway in the Mediterranean Sea — much of Africa is barely plugged into this large and wholly invisible undersea network, and the backup routes are few and far between.
The speed and power of the modern Internet, with hundreds of thousands of servers and routers in a complex but breathtakingly efficient network, have effectively abolished distance. What you read in your newspaper every morning is also available to billions of other people around the world. Nevertheless, although it is often said that information flies into computers out of the “ether”, the reality is the Internet still relies on physical connections. Even wireless connections at some point in the system must connect to wires.
The technological fixes — the creation of more backup trunk cables — will be expensive. But the players in this market, such as FLAG Telecom, which is currently investing in a $1.5-billion upgrade, called the Next Generation Network, will also reap great rewards from boosting reliability and capacity.
But in light of this week’s Internet disruption, perhaps it’s worth noting that the business world managed to function before the Internet and is pretty good at adapting to change. In light of current circumstances, perhaps the best thing to do is write off these accidents as occasional inconveniences: part of the cost of global integration and interdependence.
