Gunplay blamed for Internet slowdown
(InfoWorld) - Internet service providers in the U.S. experienced a service slowdown Monday after fiber-optic cables near Cleveland were apparently sabotaged by gunfire. — TeliaSonera AB, which lost the northern leg of its U.S. network to the cut …
Context & Ripple Effects
Physical attacks on the U.S. backbone are a repeat pattern, not a one-off: in January 2006 a fiber-optics cut disrupted Sprint service, and this week gunfire near Cleveland has again taken out physical cable, slowing service for U.S. ISPs.
The difference this time is who got hit: TeliaSonera AB lost the northern leg of its U.S. network entirely, which matters because the Swedish carrier sells transit capacity into North America — its customers feel a U.S. infrastructure failure on another continent.
First-order effects
- U.S. ISPs saw measurably slower service Monday as traffic that normally rode the cut cables was forced onto alternate paths, and TeliaSonera had to reroute around the loss of its northern U.S. leg.
Second-order effects
- Carriers selling transatlantic and long-haul capacity now face customer questions about single-point physical risk, since two cable-cut incidents in under two years have shown that one act of sabotage degrades national performance rather than just one provider.
Third-order effects
- If deliberate cuts keep occurring, route diversity and physical hardening shift from an engineering nicety to a competitive differentiator among backbone operators, with buyers pricing redundancy into transit contracts.
The trend: Backbone reliability is increasingly hostage to the physical layer, pushing carriers toward geographically diverse routing as deliberate cable damage recurs.