The fourth cut is the deepest

Last week no less than 4 major international submarine cables linking Europe, the Middle East and Asia were damaged or cut, highlighting the need for increasing diversity and investment to keep the digital world online.

When something as low tech as a ship dragging its anchor in a storm off the coast of Egypt wiped out the new economy supply line of India and the middle east the incredulous cries of "how" was across TV news. Even the WEB 2.0 crowd must have been a tad disconcerted that 75M punters are wiped out for weeks because of a bit of weather, no more virtual sofas for a while then.

The damaging of the Flag and SEMEWE cables highlights two things. The precarious nature of the current state of supply for the new economy and the need for buyers to become informed about the basics of supply (i.e. make sure you know where the source of your supply is coming from; you may be buying what you think is a diverse route via a third party, from the same supplier as your primary route).

The physical reality of the digital world is fibre cables and duct. As a pan European fibre network operator we experience the reality of fibre cuts on a weekly basis, but the benefit of pan European networks like Interoute's is that they offer diversity, meaning digital packets of content go around the break maintaining service. Internet, packets need physical network no light, no transport.

Contrary to the urban myth of excess capacity just lying untapped under ground in many cases it simply doesn't exist. This is part owing to a massive under investment in telecoms infrastructure since the wasted billions that contributed to the Telecoms crash over 10 years ago. For all that investment only one of the grand projects is still intact, Interoute. The rest of the projects fell victim to neglect and the construction workers spade.

New cable construction should help to prevent such outages in the future, according to TeleGeography but it isn't an instant solution. Interoute have seen demand double in 6 months as central and eastern Europe gets broadband and digital media continues to expand.

We are facing a classic miss timing of supply and demand where the horrors of an over supply is followed by under supply in key markets and routes. This is compounded by protectionist attitudes from traditionalists holding landing rights, effectively a tax to get access to the internet.

The solution, to coin a phrase, you need diversity to avoid adversity. Diversity in physical network for supply. Diversity in business model, outsourcing at competitive scale an international operation that gives them a competitive cost base and above all control and choice.

And as much as possible you need to diversify your delivery and supply of services. Technology and networks have moved on; onshore your delivery while you off shore the labour, seek terrestrial and open market alternatives outside of the correspondent relationships and look to those who have developed solutions using the next generation not the previous one. Our customers have done this which is why although the submarine cables are still down, they are back online and back in business.