Some years ago a train crashed in a tunnel in Pennsylvania. A fire burned in the tunnel seriously damaging the fibre optic cables that ran through it. This is starting to happen more often!

Some years ago a train crashed in a tunnel in Pennsylvania. A fire burned in the tunnel, which was used by virtually every major North American network service provider, seriously damaging the fibre optic cables that ran through it. This resulted in a dramatic loss of network bandwidth.

As all the network providers were forced to reroute traffic, the outage had a dramatic impact on users as far away as California. People like myself in Montreal, Canada experienced serious network delays for some weeks. Eventually the tunnel was repaired and the fibre optic cable was replaced - and everything went back to normal.

Reports of these events are becoming increasingly common. Here is one from the Middle East:

Neither of the cable operators have confirmed the cause or location of the outage but some reports suggest it was caused by a ship's anchor near the port of Alexandria in Egypt.

One Indian internet service provider, Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd (VSNL), linked the problems in India to the disruption in Egypt.

Egypt's Telecommunications Ministry said it would probably take several days for internet services to return to normal following the disruption on Wednesday.

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

On the bright side: Network capacity throughout the world, for the most part, is growing rapidly. On the balance bandwidth is increasing daily. The new networks being added can handle much of the excess load when a nearby network is down for repairs. For this reason we can expect, eventually, to suffer little or no effects from these incidents at some point in the future.

Hopefully that time will come soon for more people around the world.