St3v3M Loc: 35,000 feet

singleviking Loc: Lake Sebu Eco Park, Philippines

St3v3, as these are all fiber optic cables, it's seriously doubtful if they could tap into the individual fibers before this break is detected by the ground station. This was obviously an attempt to disrupt communications in this area of the Med. These cables are run and repaired by French Teleccom and may be in retaliation for the recent French support to groups and governments in North Africa. The article states that cables have been cut by ship's props but that's BS. During bad weather, many ships have dropped their anchors in an attempt to hold their position which leads to them dragging those anchors through cable areas and breaks do occur. But, this particular incident is strange since most undersea cables are buried under the sea floor from the ground station to well over a few kilometers out at sea just to protect them from this type of damage and the cables are also armor or double armor covered. Also, there is a DC voltage that is transmitted on the copper jacket inside these cables that has up to 20,000 volts of electricity for the powering of the cable repeaters located every 100- 200 kilometers or so. When a breach of the cable is detected, cable repair ships are deployed to repair the break within 24 hours of such break. Splicing a new section of cable takes from 24 hours to a few days, depending on what type of cable is being repaired, but the location of the break is quite easy to detect with either an OTDR (optical time domain reflectometer for fiber) or a TDR (time domain reflectometer for analog cables) instrument after the particular section of cable between repeaters is located. When a cable does get breached or broken, there are numerous alarms that go off in the ground station so I'm sure it was the cable ground station that notified the Egyptian authorities that there was a possible problem or terrorist act being perpetrated and exactly where to look for the criminals.