Submarine Cable

Earlier in March I visited Andaman & Nicobar Islands. The trip was purely personal as my wife happened to have been born there. These are Indian islands in the Bay of Bengal located in the South East of West Bengal and geographically quite near Myanmar and Thailand. The nearest large Indian cities on the mainland are Kolkata and Chennai.

In the initial part of the trip, we stayed in Swaraj Dweep (old name Havelock islands) and later in Port Blair. The place is isolated and has amazing natural beauty. It has one of the most beautiful beaches in the world (Radhanagar Beach). Tourism has grown nicely in Andaman & Nicobar islands in recent years and besides many other factors, one of that is a submarine cable!

A nice short 20mins video by VOX on how the internet works. It covers the basic idea of connectivity a higher level and I am probably going to pass this link to friends & family members outside of the networking domain when they ask. It also covers 60 Hudson Street which I visited exactly an year ago. :)

Today a friend from Pakistan informed about SMW4 outage. He reported about issues in Pakistan.

It seems like SMW4 is damaged near Egypt and that is what causing high load on East Asian routes giving pretty high latency.

I am at my home and sitting BSNL’s network and latency with Europe has jumped terribly to 700-800ms. Right now I do not see a direct route to Europe and it’s rather taking East Asia > US > Europe routes right now on other cable networks.

And here we get latest EIG cable i.e Euro India Gateway cable in action. Although cable was up few months back, but it’s now we are getting some changes in routing table up. (Probably earlier was test mode?).

Here’s a map of EIG cable.

This was very interesting project because of few reasons - firstly it is one (of few) cable consortium’s where India’s biggest State owned telco BSNL (also known as NIB - National Internet Backbone). Apart from that, it is one of direct link between India and UK. Earlier main route was from Mumbai to France (VSNL-Tata route) and next domestic Europeon bones Lamdanet, Telia, Level3 etc used to carry data further.