Submarine cable operator says storms could hit Pacific traffic

Hawaii's a tropical paradise, right?

Most of the time, yes. But right now Hurricane Iselle is heading for the island cluster. As the link back there explains, Iselle is packing serious winds, is expected to kick up serious waves and make life miserable.

How miserable?

Miserable enough that a submarine cable operator has issued a warning to downstream providers to let them know that cable landing stations on Hawaii might be impacted.

The warning, shared on the Australian network operators mailing list, suggests the worst likely outcome is landing stations having to switch on their generators. But there's also a promise of future updates.

Those updates may be necessary because Iselle looks like it will be followed by Hurricane Julio, which is coming in from the East and looks set to give Hawaii another lashing next week.

There's no particular need to panic about this warning: as cable entrepreneur Bevan Slattery notes on the list, the fact they've been issued shows that the cable operators concerned are on top of their game.

Nothing to worry about then, but if you get a little extra trans-Pacific latency in the next week, now you know why. ®