Recent damage to a commercial communications cable connecting Victoria and Vancouver has more impacts on Ocean Networks Canada than one might have thought! To start with, the repair, which will take several days to complete, will be performed by the only cable ship currently on the West Coast, the C/S Global Sentinel based in Portland, Oregon. It turns out that the same ship had been rented by Alcatel-Lucent Submarine Networks to complete their work on the NEPTUNE installaitons, beginning May 3rd. This work is now delayed by about 10 days.

To add to the complications for Ocean Networks Canada, this damaged cable carries traffic between our University of Victoria data centre and the University of Saskatchewan safe copy site for all of NEPTUNE and VENUS data!

Although communications are slowed, they are up and operating because network operators rerouted traffic using alternate cables between Vancouver Island and the Mainland. It is amazing how dimly aware we are of our dependancy on the hair-thin fibres through which much of our modern communications travel.