viveka wrote:
>
> The southern cross cable is really *two* cables, some distance apart,
> to minimise the likelihood of both cables failing at once. I imagine
> only one of them is cut; anyone got more info on this?
Southern Cross have been very good at keeping their customers appraised
of the situation. We have had almost hourly updates by fax and e-mail, with
personal calls from the SCCN Network Operations Center to AARNet
operational staff and management. Although this is a major outage,
we have also experienced major outages from other suppliers and SCCN's
response is of the top rank.
The e-mails containing the hard facts for the information of Link
members are:
> Sent: Sunday, 29 July 2001 2:38 PM [NZT]
> Subject: SCCL Network Event Notification
>
> Please be advised that Seg A experienced a failure at 28/7/01, 21:45 UTC
> which has affected all capacity routed via this segment between NZ,
> Australia and the US.
>
> As previously advised, Seg F1 is out of service due to remedial work on
> the re-laying of a 17kms section of the segment. As a consequence of Seg
> F1 and Seg A being out of action, all capacity on the Aust-USA routes
> has been completed disrupted.
>
> Initial analysis points to the root cause being a cable break 31kms
> out from the Alexandria Cable Station in Sydney, Australia. Current
> local weather conditions have closed the port of Sydney causing a number
> of ships to anchor off the coast. It appears that a ship due to the bad
> weather conditions may have dragged an anchor across a number of
> submarine cables including Southern Cross.
>
> SCCL have put the Cable Repair Ship "Pacific Guardian" on alert but
> because this repair may take a number of days to complete, SCCL are
> working to implement an interim restoration plan which involves
> re-routing capacity via Seg I in Hawaii within 4hrs.
>
> SCCL will also endeavour to restore SegF1 back into service within
> 12hrs once initial commissioning testing on the relayed submarine cable
> segment has been completed.
...
[ I have lightly edited the e-mails to remove contact and extraneous
information. The work on Segment F1 had been advised to SCCN customers
for a number of weeks prior to the work. ]
Later:
> Sent: Sunday, 29 July 2001 9:05 PM [NZT]
> Subject: SCCL Network Event Notification
...
> The good news is that the re-laying and visual inspection of Segment F1
> off the coast of Oregon was completed around 1030 UTC 29/7/01. We have
> performed a series of tests to confirm the continuity of the link and
> then migrated traffic back onto this segment.
...
> At this stage we believe all traffic rings are back in service between
> Morro Bay and Alexandria via Segments E, F1, G1, G2 and H.
>
> The CS Pacific Guardian will sail from Auckland Monday morning (NZ
> time) to effect a repair on Segment A.
We have had more progress reports since these, but the above
summarise the current situation. Please note that the e-mails
are from pressured workers and contemporaneous with events. Thus
they should not be regarded as solid fact but a good working
approximation (and certainly not for use as the basis for work
by any reporters on this e-mail list).
You can see the segment description of SCCN's web site, at
http://www.southerncrosscables.com/
As this is Flash-disabled I've attached a map.
The above messages are borne out by AARNet's own monitoring,
see the attached graphs (in AEST) showing the total loss
of AU-USA connectivity and then the restoration of capacity
via Hawaii with the capacity via NZ still down.
Regards,
Glen
-- Glen Turner Network Engineer (08) 8303 3936 Australian Academic and Research Network glen.turner@aarnet.edu.au http://www.aarnet.edu.au/ -- The revolution will not be televised, it will be digitised
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.1 : Tue Jul 31 2001 - 03:10:08 EST
