Here's An Interesting Viewpoint On The Cable Cuts...
Apparently, Ships Can Drag Anchors from Egypt to Malaysia.......
UPDATE - please be sure to check out part two of this post: Submarine Cables, Subsidiaries and Subversion, where you can find out information on who might stand to gain from these outages.
Alright. Grab your foil hats if you must, but theres some things that need to be said here.
While working hard at my job today I was stunned after I read
that another large submarine internet cable had been severed. This comes after the news that other cables had been severed reducing the internet, phone, and television capabilities of many countries to nil. It seems, that something is not quite right here. Just when I am starting to doubt my gut instinct, the
reports that it is in fact 5 submarine cables that have been damaged:
Quoting TeleGeography and describing the effect the cuts had on the Internet world, Mahesh Jaishanker, executive director, Business Development and Marketing, du, said, The submarine cable cuts in FLAG Europe-Asia cable 8.3km away from Alexandria, Egypt and SeaMeWe-4 affected at least 60 million users in India, 12 million in Pakistan, six million in Egypt and 4.7 million in Saudi Arabia.
According to their reports, there was another cable severed that went unreported. So, heres the list that they had of the 5 different cables:
These are SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4) near Penang, Malaysia, the FLAG Europe-Asia near Alexandria, FLAG near the Dubai coast, FALCON near Bandar Abbas in Iran and SeaMeWe-4, also near Alexandria.
As I said: 3 was quite a few. 4 is pushing it. 5 starts to make you wonder. In case you arent familiar with that part of the world, heres a map that I made which shows the approximate locations of the cuts in the underwater cables:
Were supposed to believe that these were most likely caused by an anchor from a ship fighting a storm. This author finds it hard to believe that this anchor was drug behind a boat from Egypt to Malaysia.
So everyone is scrambling to try and figure out why this would happen. Heres some of the possible reasons that I have found while looking around the internet:
U.S. Government
Israeli Government
Aliens
Underwater Monsters
The Cloverfield Monster
Rudy Giuliani
However, this author actually dug a bit deeper and found a trail that leads from the owners of most of these internet cables all the way back to some very, very large companies in the U.S. and in the U.K. Which companies you ask? Who is behind this?
Submarine Cables, Subsidiares and Subversion
First off, I want to thank everyone for the positive feedback that I have received for my last post, which illustrated the locations of the 5 submarine cables that have been damaged over the past couple of weeks. Im glad to see that some news sites such as
featured my post and that people are starting to take a critical look at what is happening.
That being said, Im sure that everyone is eager to read the results of my findings on why these cables may have been damaged, who has to gain from the damages, and where we, as concerned citizens, should start to look for answers.
Before I begin, I would like to point out that these findings are from my own research. I am not accusing anyone of anything here. I am simply providing a resource for the rest of the internet so that people can start to investigate what may really be happening over there. There are some facts out there that are just too big to ignore. While I may not be the person capable of asking the big questions to the right people, I can still provide information for the people who can.
First of all, I want to revisit the map of the cable damages that have occurred over the past few weeks:
We have been told by various organizations that these damages are attributed to power failures or by an anchor being accidentally dragged along the ocean floor during a storm. However, it doesnt take more than a 5th grade education to start to recognize that there may, in fact, be a pattern to what we are seeing here. When something like this occurs, it starts the mind roaming around the possibilities as to why this may have occurred.
Well, there are a few possibilities. Here are the top 4 possibilities/connections that this author was able to find in his research:
#4 - Big Telecom Companies
In talking to a network operations manager about the damages that have been done to the cables, the first companies that he suggested, which stand to gain from this type of damage, are the larger telecommunications companies. Especially the land-based ones. Heres why: when a huge pipeline providing tons of information to a particular area is damaged, re-routing almost always occurs before repair. This means, that the companies which surround the outage or are within the outage area stand to benefit from the sudden jump in needed bandwidth.
So, which companies have some ties into this mess? Well, there are a few companies that popped up while doing my research. However, for the scope of this article, lets look at Verizon Business. To start things off, Verizon partially owns the SeaMeWe-4 (along with AT&T) cable that was severed. According to them the repairs could take days but they were going to offer an alternative network as quickly as possible. Alternative meaning, routing through somewhere else. How else might Verizon be involved with this deal? Verizon Business has ownership in many of the submarine cables that have been in recent news. In addition, they began work in 2007 on a new cable that will render others obsolete. The construction for this is supposed to complete this year. (source) By Verizon Business
, theyre all about getting global:
Global Strategic Services Still Driving Solid Verizon Business GrowthGlobal sales of strategic services such as IP, Ethernet and managed services continued to accelerate dramatically during the past quarter, exceeding declines in revenue on a year-to-date basis from traditional core voice and data services. In the fourth quarter 2007, strategic services generated $1.4 billion in revenue, up 25.1 percent from the fourth quarter 2006.
With all that said, it seems very likely that Verizon would very much want these cables to be damaged. Whether it be to leverage their land-based networks or to further increase the popularity of their new cable, its hard to ignore the connections.
#3 - December 2007
In December of 2007, there were a few events that occurred related directly to the damages that we have recently seen. While these events may be unrelated and/or random, the correlation is hard to ignore.
December 1, 2007: Alcatel finished its merger with large U.S. telecom company Lucent. Why does this matter? Alcatel provides hardware and service to large telecommunications companies. In fact, according to their Wikipedia entry they are a leading provider of optical transmission equipment, especially for submarine communications cable.
December 20, 2007: Reliance Communications (FLAG) finishes the multi-million dollar acquisition of U.S. based company Yipes. (
) Why is this weird? Well, Yipes provides solutions for data warehousing and multimedia communications transfer. This acquisition would bring, yet another U.S. based company, tons of pull in the global telecommunications environment:
The combination of Yipes enterprise Ethernet services; the private undersea cable system of FLAG Telecom, a subsidiary of Reliance Communications; and Reliances commitment to expansion and growth will enable the creation of a global service-delivery platform with unmatched coverage and capability.
December, 2007: Iran announced that they were freely trading oil without the use of the U.S. dollar. More details about this a bit later in the post.
While there were other notable events in the global telecommunications field in 2007, December seemed to be particularly full of events that could possibly be related to the recent submarine cable damages.
#2 - Reliance Communications and FLAG
First of all, you need to understand that Reliance Communications is part of a large huge massive company that, grouped with Reliance Telecom and Flag Telecom, makes up Reliance Communications Ventures. They provide solutions for all kinds of telecommunication services for India as well as other countries. As an example (and to tie them even closer to the Middle East), in June of 2006, Reliance Communications along with Orbit Communications Company launched RiTV in the Middle East. This is an interactive multimedia solution including on-demand entertainment and internet access. (
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Reliance Communications is the leading broadband service provider in India and part of another massive group of companies known as the Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group. Together, they are delivering service to over 19 million subscribers. One of the companies belonging to this group is called Reliance Power Limited (RPL). Here again, we see a direct tie into a large mostly-considered U.S. company. Its a little company called Chevron.
How big of a stake does Chevron have here? How about a 5% (that can increase to 29%) stake in RPL? (source) Why would Chevron be interested in an Indian energy company? Jamnagar. That link leads to the Wikipedia entry for the Indian state. That link, however, does not talk about how important a role RPL plays in that state important read as: 650,000 barrels per day. But thats just the refinery that is currently there. RPL is working on a new refinery that will have a capacity of 580,000 barrels a day. Thats 1,230,000 barrels of oil money that will be coming out of Jamnagar every day. It is expected that this refinery will be completed this year. (source)
The Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group is far too large to try and track down the various connections that they may have to the Middle East, but, being that it is one of the companies most tightly knitted into this knot of submarine cable woes, they deserve a mention.
This brings us to the number 1 reason that this author has found which could explain the recent submarine cable damages.
#1 - The Iranian Oil Bourse
Through the research that I have exhaustingly done over the past few days, this is the one that has struck me as the most likely reason for the damages that have occurred to submarine internet cables.
First, a bit of background. A bourse is a, typically European, word which refers to a stock exchange. Great, so Iran is going to have their own oil stock exchange, but why does this matter? The Iranian oil bourse was going to be a stock market for petroluem, petrochemicals and gas. Whats the big catch here? The exchange planned on being ran with currencies excluding the U.S. dollar. If you remember from earlier in the post, Iran stopped allowing purchases of their oil with the U.S. dollar in December of 2007. So, obviously, the U.S. is not going to be happy about this. The biggest piece of information linking this to the recent damages is the proposed location of the bourse: the island of Kish. This is the island that is RIGHT NEXT TO at least two of the cuts that have recently occurred:
To make matters even more interesting, the bourse was scheduled to open this month.
Some of you may suddenly be thinking to yourselves that this sounds familiar. Thats because the last person who decided to stop using the U.S. dollar for trading oil was a man by the name of Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2000.
UPDATE: To further add to this argument, this would not be the first time the U.S. would have disrupted submarine cables to further themselves in times of war or conflict. (
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As I said before, these are bits of information that hopefully others can use as a resource to determine the true cause of these massive internet outages that we have seen over the last couple weeks. I am not blaming one source or the other. I am simply helping to increase the awareness of what may really be happening right under our noses.
Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of Truth and Knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods. - Albert Einstein
If you have additional information or updates to this, please drop me a line. My email address is writer at ilovebonnie.net
) and it took the poor 'specialist' fiber optic repair guy all night putting those itty bitty fibers back together.
