Okay who me cables

[The PIT]

Stop it I can't download me porn

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=10598

[lowlifecat]

was just reading this 1 minute ago

crazy shit

[Fat Tone]

get your porn elsewhere!

[Brian Ellis]

Notice the headline: "Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East" and "Undersea cable owners still won't speculate on cause of cable cuts"

'Cut' implies a deliberate action, although the article mentions 'breakages' in the body. This is deliberately bad journalism, because the article does not mention that submarine cables break all the time for many reasons. How many cables broke near Taiwan last year?

See http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=64328

[The PIT]

Notice the headline: "Bad to Worse: Fifth Undersea Cable Cut in Middle East" and "Undersea cable owners still won't speculate on cause of cable cuts"

'Cut' implies a deliberate action, although the article mentions 'breakages' in the body. This is deliberately bad journalism, because the article does not mention that submarine cables break all the time for many reasons. How many cables broke near Taiwan last year?

See http://forums.murc.ws/showthread.php?t=64328

Give it rest with your misplaced ideas.

That's the fifth cable to go in a very short time. Once twice co-incidence five times it's stretching the odds a little. If you even bothered to read it properly you'd notice the first break or cut or self inflicted cable break occurred on the 23rd. Although other reports say the 31st of Jan. Too many in a short time.

Now as to who's doing it that's another question as I can't see what benefit it brings.

[Fat Tone]

That would be "give it a rest with your misplaced ideas"

[The PIT]

That would be "give it a rest with your misplaced ideas"

Is that better???

[Fat Tone]

It just struck me as an inopportune moment to make a grammatical error. No offence meant.

[Brian Ellis]

TP

You are very quick to accuse people for what could have perfectly innocent explanations.

It may be the work of man, but it is far more likely not to be. Submarine cables are in a very hostile environment and it does not take much for them to break or permit infiltration of sea water. We don't even know the nature of the break; a common cause for loss of transmission is the repeaters which are installed every so many km. By the use of time domain reflectometry, it is possible to determine, within an error margin of a few tens of metres, where a break occurs, a special ship grapples the cable, pulls it up, cuts out the bad part and splices in a longer length, which is laid in a U, to allow seabed movements to not cause new breakages. This is literally everyday work for cable repair ships, of which there are nearly 100 dotted around the globe. If breakages were not a common occurrence, then the CRSs would not be necessary.

Having written the above, I looked up the subject in Wikipedia and found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submari...ications_cable. It states, inter alia:

Cables can be broken by fishing trawlers, anchoring, undersea avalanches and even shark bites. ... Cable breaks are by no means a thing of the past, with more than 50 repairs a year in the Atlantic alone,[9] and significant breaks in 2006 and 2008.

To effect repairs on deep cables, the damaged portion is brought to the surface using a grapple. ... The repaired cable is longer than the original, so the excess is deliberately laid in a 'U' shape on the sea-bed.

A number of ports near important cable routes became homes to specialised cable repair ships. Halifax, Nova Scotia was home to a half dozen such vessels for most of the 20th century including long-lived vessels ...

So I suppose the 50+ breaks/year in the Atlantic are also a coincidence?

Get real, man.

[Dr Mordrid]

Has anyone considered that the bottom has been deformed and that the cables were stressed to the breaking point?

[Brian Ellis]

Has anyone considered that the bottom has been deformed and that the cables were stressed to the breaking point?

This happens all the time. This is why the 20-odd cables linking Taiwan to the mainland broke last year, as the result of an earthquake, which caused the island to move a few cm. Continental drift happens! Even though the outer layers of the cable can stretch a little, the optic fibres in the middle cannot!

[Sasq]

10's of meteres bah - used to be able to get my lineies to within 2m - poor buggers had to dig up the cables so was in my best interest to not make them dig too many holes.

land based cables have 101m of optical fiber for every 100m of cable sheth. simple for the fact that while you can bend fiber cable, it doesn't stretch.

Being brutally honest, if the outer sheth is damaged in one place, pulling up the cable in another place could very well cause enough stress along the line to either cause a failure, or speed an impending failure up.

Having honestly never done the submarine cables, I can't quote, but 5 breaks in sucession in an area is not beyond the scope of probability.

[Brian Ellis]

That is why the fibres are embedded in a very thick lubricant in submarine cables, so that each fibre can move longitudinally, stress-free, according to the strain imposed on it (up to a point). The bending radius of submarine cables is of the order of metres.

[The PIT]

TP

You are very quick to accuse people for what could have perfectly innocent explanations.

Get real, man.

I haven't accused anyone of anything nope.

If you read the original article it claims that they were no ships in the area at the time. Actually this bit is referring the last cable. You spotted the word cut and attacked that as poor journalism without verifying whether it's right or not.

However if you got ot the original article it says at the end.

The experts also suggested that the cause of damage could have been a ship’s anchor that was dragging due to inclement weather conditions in the region during that particular period. “About 60-80 per cent of damages to undersea cable are due to external factors and only 10 per cent on an average can be classified as component failure,” said Tabbara. So that's one two three and four possible accounted for.

[Brian Ellis]

I haven't accused anyone of anything nope.

You accuse by implication by quoting bad journalism that implies deliberate action by the use of the word 'cut'. Additionally, your senseless subject title has the word 'who' therein, implying that you believed the breaks were due to human agencies. Knowing your views and the fact that these accidents occurred in the Middle East (where I happen to live, along with some other members of this virtual community), it was not difficult to read between the lines.