A listing of cable ships around the world and their approximate locations (as of a couple of months ago) is available from the Submarine Telecoms Forum, at http://www.subtelforum.com/ and click on "Issue 29". There just aren't that many ships in the area, or any area, for that matter. The regional cooperative facilities for cable repair and maintenance are planned based on some standard risk assessments, and the recent quakes seem to have caused damage outside the planned envelope.

On Thu Dec 28, Gaurab Raj Upadhaya wrote:

On Dec 28, 2006, at 5:35 AM, Jared Mauch wrote:

I've wondered how many boats/subs exist for these repairs and if attempting to do them all in parallel is going to be a big problem. With 6 systems having outages, it will be interesting to see when various paths/systems come back online and if there is a gating factor in underseas repair gear being available in the region.

Much of the affected cables are managed under the SEAIOCMA (South East Asia Indian Ocean Cable Maintenance Agreement). I am not sure how many ships they have on stand-by in the region, but probably not enough to send out one ship to each of the faults, given that multiple faults have been reported on most cable systems. I presume, the more important cable systems - those with higher stakes for the SEAIOCMA signatories will get repaired first followed by others. thanks