I don’t think the people running the show in Niger have the capability or know how to pull off an underwater cable shear that looks like a landslide. I bet even most developed countries wouldn’t be able to do it flawlessly.
If it's dealing with underwater cables, USS Halibut is the boat you want. They just need to look for "Made In The USA" stamped on any of the incriminating evidence.
Carter is known to have a huge slurping nose which allows for the pickup and splicing of deep ocean lines such that they can put anything as rudimentary as a vampire-tap (copper) or an actual muxing fiber splice to beam split traffic...
Nice. Of course the Wiki page of the boat is missing all of those details. However, I was disappointed that the pictures do not show landing skids!
Edit: i was looking at the image of "features" for this boat, and holy cow it looks like the most amazing spy platform. as cartoonish as that image is, anyone with any inkling of what underwater spy craft is about, this looks extremely purpose built for that "FU espionage v3.0" you mentioned.
Interesting that latency between Cape Town and Seoul actually improved (decreased) as a result of the cable cut, due to traffic being allowed on a more direct (and more expensive) route between the 2 cities.
I don't think that's the issue here if the poster is correct that the better route is more expensive than the one that failed.
It's not irrational or paradoxical to use a route that's less expensive regardless of quality, but fail over to a more expensive route that also happens to be better quality.
If you were planning to send something in the mail because it's low cost, but the post office was closed, you might use a courier service instead, pay more, and get your item to the destination quicker. No paradox there.
Routing algorithms are tunable. Especially BGP, which is what is used to route between internet carrier companies, technically known as "autonomous systems".
BGP by default prefers the path going through the least number of autonomous systems. A carrier will announce the networks they can reach. Each carrier handles routing within their autonomous system separately, with other routing protocols. BGP is concerned with routing between autonomous systems, not with routing inside each system. It is common for BGP carrier implementations to set certain paths as preferred based on contract terms with other carriers, i.e. cost.
Other routing protocols work differently. Some of them by default prefer paths with the most bandwidth. Latency is usually correlated with hop count and bandwidth. The devil is in the details.
Some have the potential to massively affect human life well above sea level, e.g. La Palma in the Canary Islands, which when it goes will inundate much of the east coast of the USA:
Nothing interesting to add, just an anecdote.
As someone based in a semi-rural part of South Africa, this dual cable break was a huge PITA for a few days. Latencies went through the roof; remote work was made very difficult.
Due to some inane regulations there is only one ship that can fix the cable break and it was busy over 8000 km away fixing another cable break - will take a week to get onsite.
I read "submarine cables" and imagined a sort of monorail or guide-wire for an underwater vehicle. I thought, "I guess that makes sense, that'd probably be cheaper or safer than an untethered submarine".
It's funny how "good" the brain is at rationalizing misconceptions like that.
If I hadn't read a couple comments to try and see why Africa (or anyone) would need a safety-rope-assisted underwater submarine I might have gone on assuming that was just a normal thing.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
But the NSO/NSA/SF red teams are formidable...
Carter is on that team.
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Carter is known to have a huge slurping nose which allows for the pickup and splicing of deep ocean lines such that they can put anything as rudimentary as a vampire-tap (copper) or an actual muxing fiber splice to beam split traffic...
Edit: i was looking at the image of "features" for this boat, and holy cow it looks like the most amazing spy platform. as cartoonish as that image is, anyone with any inkling of what underwater spy craft is about, this looks extremely purpose built for that "FU espionage v3.0" you mentioned.
More examples in Slide 10 of https://www.linkedin.com/in/dougmadory/details/featured/5001...
This is the principle behind it I believe.
It's a reaaaally cool rabbit hole.
It's not irrational or paradoxical to use a route that's less expensive regardless of quality, but fail over to a more expensive route that also happens to be better quality.
If you were planning to send something in the mail because it's low cost, but the post office was closed, you might use a courier service instead, pay more, and get your item to the destination quicker. No paradox there.
BGP by default prefers the path going through the least number of autonomous systems. A carrier will announce the networks they can reach. Each carrier handles routing within their autonomous system separately, with other routing protocols. BGP is concerned with routing between autonomous systems, not with routing inside each system. It is common for BGP carrier implementations to set certain paths as preferred based on contract terms with other carriers, i.e. cost.
Other routing protocols work differently. Some of them by default prefer paths with the most bandwidth. Latency is usually correlated with hop count and bandwidth. The devil is in the details.
I think the content that was linked is the slide deck in this blog post from the same author: https://www.kentik.com/blog/dual-subsea-cable-cuts-disrupt-a...
Undersea landslides can go for over a hundred kilometers and can last hours.
So I'm not sure why this is impressive or in question?
It doesn't seem unlikely to me.
I've never heard of underwater landslides, and I don't think it's a reasonable assumption that a reader knows anything about them.
They are a huge cause of tsunamis, with the slips often precipitated by earthquakes.
In particular, this 1952 paper by Heezen and Ewing is celebrated https://gwern.net/doc/technology/1952-heezen.pdf
Good heavens. You do surprise me. There have been some vast ones, e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storegga_Slide
Some have the potential to massively affect human life well above sea level, e.g. La Palma in the Canary Islands, which when it goes will inundate much of the east coast of the USA:
https://www.e-education.psu.edu/earth107/node/1609
The video from that is sensationalist but makes some good points:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6utAunBKXV4
It's not unlikely, it's probably true.
But it's at least a little coincidental that it happened during a coup in Niger.
https://radar.cloudflare.com/cg?dateRange=14d
It's funny how "good" the brain is at rationalizing misconceptions like that.
If I hadn't read a couple comments to try and see why Africa (or anyone) would need a safety-rope-assisted underwater submarine I might have gone on assuming that was just a normal thing.