On 6/5/24 13:28, Ron B via zanog-discuss wrote:


W.r.t. the Cote d’Ivoire outage I’m too low on the food chain to receive any RFOs now but I haven’t heard anyone having sight of one either, never mind a causation analysis that aggregates multiple RFOs across multiple cables.


For a consortium cable, RFO's are provided to each consortium member.

For a private cable, that goes to the owner of the system.

Generally, a consortium member or private cable owner "can" make that RFO available to some or all of their subsea customers. I use "can" because in some cases, it may be deemed fit to provide it to a handful of customers gratuitously, or just a subset of customers, or none at all, or those that ask.

Each case can either be treated separately or guided by the consortium member's/cable owner's general policy on PR management for system outages. In other words, there are no industry rules here.

What you cannot expect is to receive an RFO as a member of the public. Yes, a cable outage may have affected an end-user unknown to even the cable operator, but cable operators have no obligation to share any RFO information with the general public. If they do, that is just out of the goodness of their heart. If they don't, you have the benefit of reliable sources not part of the cable operator or a consortium member that have good relationships to the cable operator or a consortium willing to share some or all information about the outage.

You may find this frustrating, but if you want to be in the direct know about outages and what caused them, buy capacity on the system, or buy a service from an ISP that buys capacity from the system and press them to obtain an RFO. Moreover, public accountability is easier for private cables than it is consortium ones, but not guaranteed in either case.

 

I’ve seen pics of the cable damage off Mtunzini which points to a probable case of a fishing trawler causing the outage by steaming over both cables while bottom trawling.   In Oz, they track these ships and prosecute them, but I don’t know if there are similar operations like that on this side of the pond.


No one country has legal jurisdiction over international waters. So there is that to consider.

Secondly, are Australia prosecuting the illegal fishing trawlers for invading sovereign waters, or for disrupting telecommunications systems? If the latter, how, since subsea cables are generally private property?

Mark.