The Southern Cross Cable Explodes ( OK not really )

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#714815 9-Nov-2012 16:51

mercutio:
gzt:
mercutio: http://lists.ausnog.net/pipermail/ausnog/2012-November/015297.html

Well that was interesting but I cannot say I understand it.

Does it contradict the official statement in any way?

well it says it was unauthorised rather than routine.

What does it mean in practice that the number of Vocus routes dropped from the normal 400,000+ down to 70,000 during the fault?

mercutio

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#714816 9-Nov-2012 16:52

gzt: What does it mean in practice that the number of Vocus routes dropped from the normal 400,000+ down to 70,000 during the fault?

generally speaking, it would be assumed that international routes to the US dropped.

gzt

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#714818 9-Nov-2012 16:56

Yes, I would assume this as well - but I'm guessing Vocus is only one of a number of carriers operating on the SC network. Presumably ISPs can use different carriers as needed.

mercutio

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#714819 9-Nov-2012 17:00

gzt: Yes, I would assume this as well - but I'm guessing Vocus is only one of a number of carriers operating on the SC network. Presumably ISPs can use different carriers as needed.

yeah, in Australia there are a few choices. As far as budget providers go pipenetworks is meant to be the cheapest, and have their own cable, so would give backup capacity.

pinkydot

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#714835 9-Nov-2012 17:22

I remember last time when I was in South East Asia when the earthquake happen in Indonesia.. The whole country internet was soo slow. They said the undersea cable broke n need few months to fix at that time.

I wish it wont be happen in here.

gzt

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#714880 9-Nov-2012 19:24

It is an interesting question. Looking at the southern cross cable map you could lose any one segment (in some cases two segments) and there is still potential to restore service:

Full size map: http://www.southerncrosscables.com/home/network/overviewandmap

To what extent it is possible to reroute traffic past a physically damaged segment and what length of service disruption this would bring while the work to complete rerouting is performed - I have no idea. One for the experts.

kyhwana2

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#714915 9-Nov-2012 21:04

mercutio:
Then how come traceroute from telstra.net.au to vodafone was showing increased latency this morning (at reasonable hours). Maybe Vocus had an outage of their own on top?

Because the AU-NZ cable was down, so AU-NZ traffic over SXC was going NZ-hawaii-fiji-AU..

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kyhwana2

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#714916 9-Nov-2012 21:05

gzt: It is an interesting question. Looking at the southern cross cable map you could lose any one segment (in some cases two segments) and there is still potential to restore service:

What happened is that we lost Segment A..

sbiddle

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#714921 9-Nov-2012 21:15

kyhwana2:
mercutio:
Then how come traceroute from telstra.net.au to vodafone was showing increased latency this morning (at reasonable hours). Maybe Vocus had an outage of their own on top?

Because the AU-NZ cable was down, so AU-NZ traffic over SXC was going NZ-hawaii-fiji-AU..

There are multiple points of connectivity between NZ and AU. The outage didn't take out all AU<->NZ traffic.

kyhwana2

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#714924 9-Nov-2012 21:18

sbiddle:
kyhwana2:
mercutio:
Then how come traceroute from telstra.net.au to vodafone was showing increased latency this morning (at reasonable hours). Maybe Vocus had an outage of their own on top?

Because the AU-NZ cable was down, so AU-NZ traffic over SXC was going NZ-hawaii-fiji-AU..

There are multiple points of connectivity between NZ and AU. The outage didn't take out all AU<->NZ traffic.

I did say "over SXC".
Apart from Tasman2, what other AU-NZ cables are there?

gzt

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#714938 9-Nov-2012 21:33

We really lost 100% of Segment A? There are no reports anywhere indicating that is what occurred during the outage.

"The fault temporarily halted traffic between Australia and New Zealand for one backbone provider, which called the lack of notification from Southern Cross about the upgrade as "simply unacceptable""

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/322426,southern-cross-cable-hit-by-fault.aspx

The article implies from from sxc pov work was authorised and planned but this 'one backbone provider' in question knew nothing about scheduling of this work.

The itnews article quotes an ISP (Snap) as having purchased protected capacity and were unaffected.

Which may imply the 'one backbone provider' referred to in the article did not and was therefore affected by a planned maintenance upgrade. Lack of notification did not help, maybe the unidentified 'backbone provider' would have planned around the work if known, and that is what they are upset about.

kyhwana2

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#714944 9-Nov-2012 21:42

KAREN and FX had protected capacity and latency on both of those went up about a right amount for it being re-routed through to Hawaii and back to AU..

old3eyes

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#715070 10-Nov-2012 10:57

Oncop53: Is there a more official source than the Labour party website?
Also what kind of legitimate software update would cause hardware to "blow up"? this must be delibrate, or else unbelievably incompetent.

I think it's more of a Labor party beat up as they seem to right behind the Pacific Fiber attempt..

Regards,

Old3eyes

MattR

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#715116 10-Nov-2012 12:52

kyhwana2:
Because the AU-NZ cable was down, so AU-NZ traffic over SXC was going NZ-hawaii-fiji-AU..

The cable wasn't down. It looks like they lost one wavelength on the SYD-AKL leg. Vocus and 3 other customers were using that wavelength. No idea who the other customers are, but either they're not making any noise, or they had capacity on other wavelengths which weren't affected.

kyhwana2

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#715118 10-Nov-2012 12:55

MattR:
kyhwana2:
Because the AU-NZ cable was down, so AU-NZ traffic over SXC was going NZ-hawaii-fiji-AU..

The cable wasn't down. It looks like they lost one wavelength on the SYD-AKL leg. Vocus and 3 other customers were using that wavelength. No idea who the other customers are, but either they're not making any noise, or they had capacity on other wavelengths which weren't affected.

ahh gotcha, so they were only upgrading gear that Vocus/etc were using and no one else? (Going off latency alone, i'd say KAREN was one of the customers that brought protected capacity)

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