Let the feeding frenzy begin. It's Shark Week on the Discovery channel, and it's time for the brand new SharkFest joint venture between National Geographic and Fox. Nom nom nom.

Watching sharks and how they behave is akin to rubbernecking a traffic accident—you just gotta look. But one thing you won't likely see these beasts eating is subsea telecommunication lines. The International Cable Protection Committee, a group that represents that industry, is putting out the message that sharks are no longer responsible for denial-of-service attacks.

During last year's Shark Week, a YouTube video of a shark biting a seabed cable gained intense media exposure and more than one million views, the group said.

"The International Cable Protection Committee (ICPC) has reviewed records of cable faults worldwide, and together with an assessment of the video, conclude that much of the media hype was incorrect. Essentially, sharks and other fish were responsible for less than one percent of all cable faults up to 2006. Since then, no such cable faults have been recorded," the group said in a message.

The group also said that "expert advice suggests the cable was attacked by a six-gill, blunt nose shark (Hexanchus griseus), which took one bite and swam away. The cable sustained no obvious external damage and is unlikely to have suffered internal damage."

The committee said that "improved cable design" and other measures such as burying cable are among the main reasons for the decline in shark bitings of subsea cables. The main culprits, according to the committee, are "ships' anchoring and fishing activities, which account for 65-75 percent of all cable faults." Others reasons include "natural phenomena" such as subsea landslides, ocean currents, and "cable component failure."

The latest "natural phenomena" to take out a cable happened just three days ago. A fiber optic cable funneling the Internet to the Northern Mariana Islands was severed, taking tens of thousands of people offline. Access has been slowly returning to the US territory just north of Guam in the western Pacific Ocean.

Telecommunications provider IT&E said, "Indications are that this failure is a result of complications from the recent passing of Typhoon Chan-Hom."

The International Cable Protection Committee said the first recorded shark bites on seabed cable occurred in 1985 through 1987, off the Canary Islands.

"These pioneering systems were damaged by small sharks biting through cable's polyethylene sheath," the committee said. "Testing by Bell Laboratory scientists showed the culprit was the deep-dwelling, crocodile shark (Pseudocarcharias kamoharai) that occupied water depths of 1060-1900m. Those events led to design improvements of the cables' protective sheathing that effectively eliminated the problem."

Listing image by YouTube