Fishing trawler cuts Sudan’s main Internet cable

As I was looking for pictures of the damage done by fishing trawlers to the sea floor, I found this item on Blake Rig’s blog, from February: “The damage that fishing trawlers can do.”

I am going to briefly mention one particular Italian trawler, which, sometime last week, was fishing not far from Palermo.

Some days ago, we noticed that our new high-speed connection at work was starting to run exceedingly slow, and occasionally was not working at all. This is proving immensely frustrating.

How are the two seemingly random comments above connected? Well, the answer came to me last night, whilst I was chatting with a friend who holds a fairly senior position at Canar, the telecommunications company. He told me that, whilst this trawler was fishing off the Italian coast, it somehow managed to cut through the major cable that plugs most of Sudan into the Internet…. The internet in Sudan is screwed because of some poxy Italian fishing vessel.