[101127] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: VSNL CANTAT-3 Optical Submarine Cable
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Neil J. McRae)
Tue Dec 18 13:53:11 2007
From: "Neil J. McRae" <neil@domino.org>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:50:10 +0000
To: Martin Hannigan <hannigan@gmail.com>
CC: Rod Beck <rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com>, <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
So in a former life I experienced first hand this cable between 97 and 99 a=
nd it had quite a few issues and outages some that lasted a significant per=
iod of time. One of which was a failure in the Iceland region caused by a b=
oat of some description. Id need to boot up my old sparc to untar the mail =
backup to be sure though.
Its was a great cable for cheap links for EU to US voice but for Internet t=
he additional C.70ms from PP to NYC made it suboptimal however in the late =
nineties bandwidth was still relatively pricey most trafic EU to US was pai=
d all by the EU SPs and Cantat3 was cheap and had less half circuit type is=
sues than other TAT cables.
Regards,
Neil
-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Hannigan <hannigan@gmail.com>
Sent: 18 December 2007 15:47
To: neil@domino.org
Cc: Rod Beck <rod.beck@hiberniaatlantic.com>; nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: VSNL CANTAT-3 Optical Submarine Cable
On Dec 18, 2007 8:11 AM, Neil J. McRae <neil@domino.org> wrote:
> > How about VSNL CANTAT-3? Any idea what's going on here?
>
> Its a very old cable which I'm sure must have passed its service life by
> now. It was frequenty affected by issues near iceland. (trawlers IIRC
> etc).
>
It's just approaching 15 years old and I think for '94 that this is
the expected lifespan. In January of '06 there was a major outage on
Cantat-3 that took a very long time to repair. This is why most people
can even recall the name. Check the nanog archives if you are
interested in the discussion that took place here.
There is a major fishing ground north of the cantat route off of
Iceland and south of Hornsfjordur , but the cable does not run through
it as far as I know, a little to East, and the "big" outage was
situated in the North Sea, southwest of Bergen, Norway. I'm not sure
about other outages. I have found some interesting stuff in some NOC
archives though.
Best,
Martin
