PS_RalphW wrote: ↑07 Jan 2024, 20:56
I also worked in IT, and increasingly on the internet, for 35 years. Post covid I became handyman for the parish council before relocating. These days I volunteer at a cafe, volunteer driver to hospitals and help out at a bike repair clinic. Much more satisfying but unpaid.
These days I’m mostly a stay at home grandad to my brave but autistic grandson - and very happy to be able to do that.
I’ve tried to ‘collapse ahead of the rush’ by moving to a 3 storey house (4 including the basement) within 5 minutes walk of the railway station, bus station and town centre of a midlands county town.
More rooms than we need at present, so several spare rooms available for lodgers as central locations become more desirable post car era; and thus an income stream for the future.
This paper from Policy Exchange (is as daft as you'd expect but still) has a few good points and maps in it. It's all about Republic of Ireland's role in UK security - A LOT of fibre optic cables pass through ROI waters and they don't have much of a navy with which to defend them with.
The BBC story seems to imply that the terrorists don't have the capability to cut the cables, I'm not convinced, if they can hijack a tanker and drag the anchor across the shallower parts of the route they have a good chance of damaging the link.
"There is nothing I've seen in the Iranian orbat (Order of Battle) that could touch these cables, certainly not their submarines," says former Royal Navy Cdr Tom Sharpe.
That sounds overly confident to me! How hard are the cables to find? How hard is it to detonate some high explosives in the vicinity? An undersea cable isn't as tough as the cement and steel gas pipeline.
The Red Sea is deep, ~3000m max with most more than 500m. Maybe most of the cables are much deeper than Iranian subs and divers can go. The question becomes, where the weakest, shallowest, most vulnerable part?
As has already been posted, deliberately dragging a ships anchor across the cable route is the obvious mode of attack against underwater cables. No divers, explosives or submarines needed.
The shore ends are even more vulnerable to very low technology attacks.
"Installers and owners of emergency diesels must assume that they will have to run for a week or more"
I can see the latest forum member is posting one line comments to the forum.
On the subject of undersea cables I don't see the problem if these Red Sea cables get cut. They probably provide traffic to and from Europe and Asia and stopping these might lead to an increase in employment back in Europe as no doubt a lot of the traffic in this cable is from offshored jobs in India and East Asia.
It seems like most of the cables are across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans which are the major vulnerability. Obviously if terrorists attack Western infrastructure then it only seems right to respond by attacking their infrastructure like food storage and processing facilities and power generation facilities and the like so that they may consider the consequences of their actions as they slowly starve to death.
Perhaps this is why Starlink was brought into operation as an alternative to undersea cables.
Starlink is increasingly being used by Russian forces in Ukraine and has been activated across Russian held territory. Meanwhile the connection speed in Ukrainian territory has slowed almost to a crawl. Has Musk flipped sides?
This is a non-story about Starlink. The service absolutely isn't available in Russia. It likely can be used on the front line though as the geofencing isn't that specific, it's always been the case that users can unofficially move terminals to adjacent (or beyond) cells and still receive service. The service degrads, starts to drop out the further away you go. The most likely source of terminals is captured Ukrainan hardware.
Much of west and central Africa without internet after undersea cable failures https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... e-failures
"NetBlocks said data transmission and measurement showed a major disruption to international transits, “likely at or near the subsea network cable landing points”.
At least a dozen countries have been affected by the outage, and there were fears of disruption of essential services in worst-hit states such as Ivory Coast, where the disruption was severe."
