Huawei Marine announced Friday, the conclusion of a turnkey contract signed with Tunisia Telecom to supply a system of submarine cable called HANNIBAL linking Tunisia and Italy.

The "HANNIBAL System " run for 170 km and connects Kelibia in the Italian town of Mazara, across the Mediterranean, with a maximum capacity of 3.2 Tbps. Once completed in late 2009, the "System Hannibal" develop a capacity of 80 wavelengths 10Gbit/sec per fiber pair, with the capability to be increased to 40Gbit/s to meet the demand for international communication.

The "System Hannibal" will play an important role in external communications of Tunisia. Marine Networks Huawei is a reliable partner that offers excellent solutions and a delivery capacity confirmed, two reasons which have dictated the choice of Huawei Marine. "Said Montassar Ouaili, CEO of Tunisie Telecom.

"We are honored to be the prime contractor for the" System Hannibal "and we are proud to be able to contribute to the development of telecommunications in Tunisia. Marine Huawei will provide a system of submarine cables with a huge capacity and high reliability as well as the most cost-effective solutions for customers. We will provide a better project and plan for greater cooperation in the future, "said its share Ian Douglas, CEO of Huawei Marine Networks.
Marine Networks Huawei Co., Ltd is a joint venture by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. and Global Marine Systems Limited. It is the world leader in optical communications technology and is specialized in building communications networks submarine world.

Source [African Manger]

TUNIS - An other submarine fiber-optic cable linking Tunisia to Europe by the end of year contributing to improving the competitiveness' of the country.

It would allow Tunisie Telecom to offer corporate cost control, quality of services in line with international standards.

Via [Studio Celentano]

The capacity of the submarine cable system South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4), which connects many countries between Singapore and France, is to be doubled by the end of 2009 under a multi-million dollar project. The upgrade will be beneficial to India, as the cable system in one of the major bandwidth providers to the country.

The doubling of the cable system would result in increasing the trunk capacity of the cable and helping it support increasing broadband traffic along the route.

The cable system, owned by a consortium of 16 telecom carriers, has awarded the upgradation contract to global infrastructure major Alcatel-Lucent and Japanese company Fujitsu.

According to industry sources, Alcatel-Lucent has been awarded the turnkey contract for upgrading certain segments, linking between Mumbai and Marseilles in France.

The company will deploy additional dense wavelength division multiplexing equipment (DWDM) - a data transmission technology - on the India-France link and upgrade a terrestrial link connecting Alexandria and Suez.

Moreover, Alcatel-Lucent has the overall responsibility for the end-to-end realisation of the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), a technology that transmits digital signals with different capacities.

The upgradation of the cable’s link between Mumbai and Singapore will be undertaken by Fujitsu, which will again be deploying DWDM technology.

SEA-ME-WE-4 spans nearly 20,000 km linking 14 countries from France to Singapore through Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia. It has 16 landing stations, including one each in Mumbai and Chennai.

India’s Bharti Airtel and Tata Communications (formerly Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd) are the consortium partners in India, with the latter also being the network administrator for the system.

The cable system had a transmission capacity of 1.28 terabits and was lighted up in 2005. India is served by around 10 cable systems, including the consortium cables SEA-ME-WE series, Tata-Indicom-Chennai cable,Reliance-owned Flag and Falcon, BSNL cable and Bharti owned i2i among others.

Via [Business starndard]

It turns that Tunisie Telecom after warning people about the possible network outage, have changed its version from "maintenance" to "incident", the limited internet access accruing those days can longer more that the 12 hours planned to take a couple of other weeks, in the meanwhile, we hope the 2nd submarine cable will make it.

A insider from an other Telecommunication company doubts about TT tellings and wonders what does happens really to the Internet when it did sweep its customers om ISDN lines in the wait of restoring the international T1 connection.

The prophecy was true, one of the main submarine cables providing Tunisia with connection (Phone and Data) over Italy is down as the maintenance of the famous cut cables going to middle east from Europe.

The country is working as its half speed, a low connection is remarkably here and everybody wonder the worst, the remaining France connection is the only link to the outer world and as it happened in the middle east, things have started by a maintenance and half of cables eaten by fish.

Ob of the rumors to explain the whole "accident" thing is that there was a submarine earthquake that did damage the cables, others are talking about a conspiracy trying to push the middle east back to the dark ages, while all this happens nobody can really find an answer.

Tunisia is connected to the outer world through tow submarine connections: the major one from France and the other from Italy thus I have been acknowledged from a Tunisie Telecom(Tunisia monopolist telephone company) Insider that the internet connection would be down tonight from 10 pm to 10 am local time (+1 CST) for maintenance purposes.

What the hell is going on? and even if there was such maintenance works, why we shouldn't be able to get through the other one even with limited access? in my humble opinion we would be off for a while, exactly as it happened in the middle east.

Something is happen inning in the background and nobody wants to tell about it, I'll may be able to write again here. in the meanwhile hope me good luck, in Tunisia Internet is no more an alternative playground for kids, it's about 90% business communications gateway.

Even most of the wireless connections that goes through Wimax and Satellite will be affected as the providers such as Divona contract the Inetrbet service from a cable Partner (Planet), those few lucky companies who have dedicated up link and down link will be the only one getting to the outer world.

You may have noticed a number of stories recently about undersea cables getting cut around the world. Apparently the total is now up to 5, but the scariest part of this is that Iran is now offline. You can also read Schneier's comments on this coincidence.

Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week -- a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).

Via [SlashDot]
Via [Engaget]



Any coming war into the gulf? internet for Petrol pressure? I wonder what's coming next and I know that doesn't mean a simple offline issue, it's about something really dangerous.

Click to enlarge.

A third undersea cable has been cut, effectively eliminating the Internet in the Middle East. But according to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq.

Is it a coincidence that these three countries, who represent the next phase of the war on terrorism, were spared in the communications blackout that is affecting the rest of the Middle East?

...

The news of the multiple acts of cable sabotage are clear proof that a hostile force is doing its best to isolate the greater Middle East region (all the way to India) from the rest of the world. With the Internet down, it will be impossible for anyone to transmit video evidence out of the visually-embargoed zone

Via [Daily scare]

It seems that the recent Internet block out in the middle east is some kind of message in the next pressure methods, no more needs to troops invasion but a cut off of today's most valuable vital needs: the Internet.

If the rumors and the analytics are true, we just got into the so awaited star wars, where the fiction is the real new cold war between the so ever friends-enemies, perhaps the support of the middle east to Lebanon ans Palastinian resistance became an intolerable headache especially in the upcoming confrontations with Iran.

Though, the west healthy and pitiless is showing up his ability to control the world without moving army forces, a deadly weapon for whom the world is addicted, so can imagine in this time being unable to access the Internet or going back to dirty faxes and post mail?

NEW DELHI: Internet communication links for hundreds of millions of people in India and across the world were disrupted after an anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged two submarine cables Sea-Me-We-4 and Flag on Wednesday morning.

Internet users faced a slowdown in service with many websites remaining either totally inaccessible or taking a considerably long time to download.

While early on Thursday, reports of disruption appeared severe with ISP Association of India's president, R Chharia estimating almost 50% of net connections in the country to be down, damage control efforts by companies saw a near complete restoration of services by late evening.

"Since internet is now the nerve centre for business and communication, our real concern is focussed on lack of access for users. This episode points to a need for superior disaster management of the IT ecosystem," says Naresh Ajwani, president, Sify Ltd.
However, the situation did manage to take a favourable turn.

"Our teams worked all night to restore services to 80% of our customers and the balance will be taken care of by the end of the day", said Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel.

Sea-Me-We-4 is a 20,000 km optical submarine cable network which links the 14 countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

Bharti Airtel, India's leading telecom services firm and Tata-owned VSNL are part of the consortium that owns Sea-Me-We-4 while the Reliance Group owns Flag.

According to Kohli, customers will now only face a latency problem of about 700 milliseconds, but no disruption of services.

"Its been an extraordinary event, its impact has been most severe in India and the Middle East", admits David Nishball, president, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel.

According to Nishball, services to voice customers, private leased circuits across the Atlantic and private networks of corporates have been completely restored.

"However, IT customers have been severely impacted. We have rerouted them to the Pacific route from the Atlantic route, so there is some congestion", he says.

However, Nishball says that customer experience should see a dramatic improvement over the next 24 hours owing to efforts to put up additional circuits on the cable network to increase the capacity of the highway to accommodate the additional traffic.

Via [The Times of India]