Better 'fess up to submarine cable cockups, FCC demands

Regulator puts out new rules to bring internet in line with telephone world

[tangor]

Incredible as it may seem, there are currently no rules around the reporting of outages in submarine cables.

On Thursday, America's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tried to rectify that by putting out new rules for public comment that would make it obligatory for US companies to report any outages that saw more than 50 per cent of the traffic going through them affected for 30 minutes or more.

There are roughly 60 submarine cables that connect to the United States. Not only do they represent the internet access in its entirety for many US territories (Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and others), but they also carry 95 per cent of the US' international internet traffic, as well as voice and data.

[theregister.co.uk...]
While this is news, it is not news enough to find a forum to up my post count. Foo works just fine. :)

But I did not know the number of undersea cables was 60. Just got through watching two documentaries regarding the first two trans-Atlantic cables ever laid and that's some kind of work.... That there are 60 US centric, what about the rest of the world? That's a lot of cable!

[lucy24]

many US territories (Hawaii, Guam, American Samoa, Puerto Rico, and others)

They've demoted Hawaii? Who knew?

[ergophobe]

Somewhere out there on the wide wide web there is a diagram of undersea cables shown proportional to traffic carried...

[tangor]

Australia recently lost some service over undersea cable.... need to find that report, and see if it has been fixed, yet. :) Apparently ship anchors are a PITA.