Redundancy and restoration in the cable network

Assembled from 28 blocks · 2 evidence · 26 related

1. Story
2. The reason most cable breaks are invisible, and the reason a few are catastrophic. There are between about 150 and 200 cable faults somewhere in the world every year — roughly three a week — and almost none of them makes the news, because international traffic is routed over many systems and a carrier that loses one path restores its traffic onto another within minutes. That restoration is bought, planned and rehearsed: capacity is held on other systems for exactly this purpose. But redundancy is a property of the route, not of the contract. Buying capacity on two cables gives no protection if both lie in the same corridor, land at the same station, or cross the same strait, and it gives no protection at all if the total spare capacity on surviving routes is smaller than the traffic that has to move onto them. That is why an incident becomes visible in exactly two circumstances: when several cables in one corridor fail together, and when a place has few enough cables that losing one or two removes most of its capacity. Both conditions describe geography rather than technology, and both are the reason this Journey is about places.
3. Knowledge
4. Locating and repairing a cable fault
5. The cable chokepoint
6. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
7. Connections
8. The cable chokepoint
9. Locating and repairing a cable fault
10. East Asian connectivity degrades for weeks
11. Both cables to the Matsu Islands are cut within six days
12. Four cables fail off Côte d'Ivoire and thirteen countries lose connectivity
13. SMW4 and IMEWE are cut near Jeddah
14. Marseille
15. The Luzon Strait
16. The Red Sea cable corridor
17. The Strait of Malacca
18. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
19. Four cables fail off Côte d'Ivoire and thirteen countries lose connectivity
20. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
21. The cable ship
22. Redundancy and restoration in the cable network
23. A permanent Atlantic cable lands at Heart's Content
24. Eleven cable ships repair the Luzon Strait cables
25. Both cables to the Matsu Islands are cut within six days
26. Evidence
27. Supports the figures used here for annual cable faults — approximately 150 to 200 worldwide each year, with roughly 70 to 80 per cent caused by accidental human activity, principally fishing gear and ships' anchors, and dragged anchors alone about 30 per cent. V55 verification basis: retrieved search results attributed these figures to the ICPC, but no ICPC page was opened — www.iscpc.org was probed once with WebFetch in this session and returned EGRESS_BLOCKED. The figures are the ICPC's own and are not independently audited.
28. Narrow claim, and only this: that the Internet Society published an outage report in April 2024 on the West Africa submarine cable failure of 14 March 2024, and that the report records connectivity disruption across thirteen named countries — Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Liberia, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, South Africa and Togo. V55 verification basis: a retrieved search result carried the report's title, publisher and April 2024 date together with this country list and attributed them to internetsociety.org. The report PDF itself was not opened, and no measurement inside it — outage depth, duration or traffic loss — is claimed here.