Cloudfare, a cloud infrastructure and cybersecurity company, has carried out an analysis of two recent incidents that have occurred in submarine Internet cables in Europe, which shows that the good design and functioning of the network system on the continent It makes it possible that problems with submarine cables do not cause as much damage as would be expected.
On Sunday, November 17, 2024, the BCS East-West Interlink submarine cable connecting Sventoji (Lithuania) and Katthammarsvik (Sweden) was damaged around 10:00 local time in Lithuania. In less than 24 hours, the C-Lion1 submarine cable, which connects Helsinki (Finland) and Rostock (Germany) also suffered damage during the early hours of Monday, November 18.
As can be seen from the Cloudfare Radar graphs, none of these incidents caused a significant unfavorable impact on the Internet connection of the affected countries, demonstrating great resilience in the continental structure. This is possible in part thanks to the operators’ ability to divert traffic along other cables or alternative routes.
From Telia Lietuva, the telco that operates the cable between Sweden and Lithuania, they noted that “the Lithuanian cable carried approximately a third of the country’s Internet capacity, but the capacity was transported on other routes.”
Thus, the firm explains that “the construction of a redundant and resilient network architecture, at multiple levels, is a good practice”, as has been evident with these events in Europe. Building a resilient network “includes sending traffic over multiple physical cables (submarine and terrestrial), connecting to multiple peer and upstream network providers, and even avoiding single points of failure on core Internet resources like servers.” DNS.
The cuts did not alter the quality of the network
In the case of Lithuania and Sweden, Cloudfare’s Internet quality metrics for both countries show changes in measured bandwidth and latency throughout the day on Sunday, but “no sudden anomalous changes visible around the time of the outage.” of the cable. An increase in latency would be one of the expected effects after a cut in an undersea cable, however, the slight increase in latency in Sweden began to be recorded a little before the cable cut, so it is probably not even related to the event.
The same is true for the Germany-Finland cable, as both Finland and Germany also have a redundant and resilient submarine cable infrastructure, with more than 10 cables reaching Finland and almost 10 reaching Germany, including Atlantic Crossing -1 (AC-1), which connects with the United States through two different routes.
Likewise, “Arelion and eunetworks terrestrial fiber maps (to cite just two examples) show multiple redundant fiber routes within both countries, as well as cross-border routes to other neighboring countries, allowing for more resilient Internet connectivity,” they point from Cloudfare.
