February 4th, 2008
Don't get excited over cable breaks. Yet.
This weekend there was a lot of hand wringing over some posts to Digg, reddit, and slash dot that pointed to this page at the Internet Traffic Report. There is one router in Iran that is not responding to pings so it shows up red. This led to the rapid development of a conspiracy theory that the US is systematically cutting the undersea cables to the Mideast in preparation for an invasion of Iran!
For a great analysis of the cable breaks and the impact on Mideastern countries check out the Renesys blog. In one post they even track the “winners and losers” in the telecom space as those networks that were cut off scramble to replace their provider. I’ll be checking this blog often from now on!
Richard Stiennon is an industry consultant. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
