There Is No Undersea Cable-Cutting Bogeyman

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Omar Sultan, chief executive of Dubai's IPS DU, said Friday that the incident was "very unusual." He said it was not known how the underwater FLAG FALCON cable, stretching between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, had been damaged.

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"The site is a restricted area, which excludes the possibility that the malfunction resulted from a crossing ship," the ministry said in a statement. Internet efficiency in Egypt has reached about 70 percent, the statement said....
Flag Telecom's network is one of the "newest in existence" so it would be unlikely that the cables would break because of wear and tear or age.

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Data from the field
In deep waters, cable cuts are rare. According to one paper presented at last year's SubOptic conference in Baltimore, Maryland, rates of cable fault in water over 1km deep are less than 0.1 faults per year, per 1,000km of installed cable. This implies around 50 deepwater repairs per year, globally. At depths of less than 1km, failure rates hovered between 1-2 per 1,000km in the 1990s, but have been steadily declining. According to a SubOptic 2004 paper, the rate in 2003 was 0.2 fault per 1,000km. This same paper estimated that 60% of all cable cuts occur in waters less than 100 meters deep. Of all cable faults, roughly three-fourths are due to "external aggression," the bulk of which is accidental human activity, namely, fishing, anchors, and dredging; a small portion of the 75% is natural, e.g., from earth movement and chafe, sometimes caused by earthquakes. Equipment failures and unknown - some portion of which could be theft or attempted theft/sabotage - account for the remainder. In deep water, natural causes and/or cable equipment failure dominate; human causes are rare. Hence, when cables fail in deep water, usually a natural and detectable event is the cause, as with the late 2006 earthquake near Taiwan, the last quake to cause multiple simultaneous outages. An earthquake, albeit small (magnitude 4.8) was reported February 2 in the Persian Gulf and could have affected cables there.

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