Egypt has only 40 pct Internet after cable fault

[me]

Egypt has only 40 pct Internet after cable fault

Thu Jan 31, 2008 6:35am EST

 

 

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt had only about 40 percent of its Internet capacity available on Thursday because of a disruption to an undersea cable that has also affected the Gulf region and south Asia.

 

The cable connection broke off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, slowing or stopping Internet access for users across large parts of Asia, and forcing service providers to try to reroute traffic via other cables or satellites.

 

"The service will come up to 40 percent this morning. And by tomorrow up to 70 percent," said Mariam Fayez, a spokeswoman for the Egyptian telecommunications ministry.

 

"We are seeking alternative solutions such as satellite and alternative cable."

 

In Cairo, some residents reported that their Internet connections were working at slow speed, while others still had no workable access to the Web. Egypt had said on Wednesday it would take several days for services to return to normal.

 

The Egyptian ministry said it did not know how the connection had been cut, or if weather was a factor. Storms had forced Egypt to temporarily close the northern mouth of the Suez Canal on Tuesday, making ships wait in the Mediterranean.

 

The digital blackout disrupted Egyptian financial market operations on Wednesday. Gulf Arab countries and India also reported significant disruptions to Internet connectivity.

 

(Writing by Cynthia Johnston; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

[me]

Damaged cables disrupt Internet in Middle East

IDG News Service 1/30/08

 

Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service, Seattle Bureau

Two underwater cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday morning, dragging Internet connections throughout the Middle East and in parts of Asia to a crawl.

 

The cables, one operated by Flag Telecom and the other by a consortium of 15 telecommunications operators, account for 75 percent of the network capacity between Europe and the Middle East, according to Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography Research.

A third cable was undamaged, but it is older and has far less capacity than the others, he said.

 

Operators believe the damage was caused by ship anchors during a heavy storm at sea, Beckert said. Wire services reported that ships heading for Egypt's northern coast were diverted due to the storms, and their anchors may have severed the cables several miles from shore.

 

AT&T confirmed that its service to some areas of the Middle East was affected, but said it was now re-routing traffic. Etisalat, the telecommunications provider in the United Arab Emirates, reported that both Internet traffic and international voice calls were affected by the incident. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states were affected, Beckert said.

 

As much as 70 percent of Egypt’s Internet network was down, and over half of India's bandwidth was cut due to the disruption, according to a report from Reuters that cited local officials.

 

Most of the major operators have backup plans in place for this type of incident, Beckert said. In this case, they'll have to route traffic from the Middle East to Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, through the U.S. and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, he said. That will result in latency problems that will likely lead to sluggish connections until the cables are repaired, he said. The operators in the Middle East told him that they should be able to repair the damages in one to two weeks.

 

The accident should affect mainly Internet traffic. Voice calls travel over the same cables, but operators will give priority to the voice calls, which take up relatively little capacity but produce more revenue than data traffic. Beckert estimates that 1 percent or less of traffic carried on the cables is voice.

 

 

Nancy Gohring is Seattle correspondent for the IDG News Service.

[me]

Cable damage disrupts Egypt,

Gulf telecoms and Internet

 

 

Damage to a submarine cable in the Mediterranean caused disruption to Internet services in Egypt and Kuwait and to telephone services in the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday, officials said.

 

"A communication cable in the Mediterranean Sea was cut, which led to partial disruptions to Internet and communication services in Egypt," Egyptian Minister of Communication and Information Technology Tareq Kamel said.

 

The minister, who did not elaborate, said an emergency team had been formed to try to find alternative communication channels, with a ministry statement saying it could take several days for services to return to normal.

 

In Kuwait, the communications ministry said two cables in the Mediterranean off Alexandria had been cut, affecting traffic around the region, and causing slower than normal service in the Gulf emirate.

 

Spokesman Ahmed Ramadan said the incident was the result of "weather conditions and maritime traffic" and that it would take 12 to 15 days to repair the cables.

 

He added that Kuwait was seeking "alternative solutions" and hoped to return to normal Internet service in three to five days.

 

Elsewhere in the Gulf, Emirati providers Etisalat and Du said international telephone services were affected and that they were working to restore services as quickly as possible, the United Arab Emirates' WAM news agency reported.

[N.O.R.F]

Its been working fine. A little slower than usual a few days ago but nothing major.

[NGONGE]

^^ It affected Abu Dhabi yesterday. Had a problem phoning a company there and when we asked BT they told us about the cable. I thought it was a silly joke.

[me]

What is interesting is that a countries internet can go go off teh air. I thouyght that the internet could not be shut down.

[NGONGE]

^^ Heh.

[N.O.R.F]

Makes you think of the the over dependency on the net these days. On our current project we use Aconex (an online document management and web collaboration system that uses the internet to manage information for projects of all sizes in construction, engineering and facilities management). If the net is down, there is no work!

[Caano Geel]

^ it does, but considering the internet was built to be resilient to the nuclear all out of the cold war, it is worrying that that the a cable cut kills 60% of south asia connectivity.

 

Actually the more serious problem is the way communications technology is converging to use the net for connectivity like the telephone networks and how this reduces resilience of all communications

[N.O.R.F]

It did take a while to make Int calls last night and tonight.

[Geel_jire]

This is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Internet was designed the way it is exactly for situations like this. It is a self correcting system In the event of a particular route being down a new route is automatically used. This is one of the major advantages of packet switching networks vs. circuit switching.

 

'Autonomous Systems' are completely independent, imagine a cable fault in the Mediterranean taking down internet traffic in north America.

 

Two undersea telecommunication cables were cut on Tuesday evening, knocking out Internet access to much of Egypt, disrupting the world's back office in India and slowing down service for some Verizon customers.

 

One cable was damaged near Alexandria, Egypt, and the other in the waters off Marseille, France, telecommunications operators said. The two cables, which are separately managed and operated, were damaged within hours of each other. Damage to undersea cables, while rare, can result from movement of geologic faults or possibly from the dragging anchor of a ship.

 

One of the affected cables stretches from France through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, then around India to Singapore. Known as Sea Me We 4, the cable is owned by 16 telecommunications companies along its route.

In defense of the particular network operators involved, Networks are usually designed on the principle that it is highly unprobable that separate ,independent links simultaneously go down. Although more fault tolerance should have been built into the system.

[Geel_jire]

A third cable has been cut !

and they say likely due to ship Anchor's

is anyone else finding this wierd

 

DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--A third undersea fibre optic cable running through the Suez to Sri Lanka was cut Friday, said a Flag official.

Two other fiber optic cables owned by Flag Telecom and consortium SEA-ME-WE 4 located near Alexandria, Egypt, were damaged Wednesday leading to a slowdown in Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and South Asia.

"We had another cut today between Dubai and Muscat three hours back. The cable was about 80G capacity, it had telephone, Internet data, everything," one Flag official, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.

The cable, known as Falcon, delivers services to countries in the Mediterranean and Gulf region, he added.

"It may take sometime to fix the cut but we are rerouting the traffic to another cable in the U.K. and U.S., the bandwidth utilization will go down," the official said.

There are conflicting reports of how the two Alexandria cables were cut. Oman's largest telecom, Omantel, said a tropical storm caused the damage while the United Arab Emirates' second largest telecom, said the cables were cut due to ships dragging their anchors.

How likely is a coordinated Anchor accidents from in completely different geographical locations ??

 

to the SOLers in the region, is this third cut affecting you as bad the first two ?

[Jacaylbaro]

I think the Somaliland one was cut too ,,,,, It is damn slow here today ,,

[Baluug]

I wonder how many Arabs so far have blamed this on the Jews?

 

And another thing....Don't ships have anchors so they don't move? Why are they dragging them?

[Jacaylbaro]

Something to do with Osama i guess ,,,, doest he have ships horta ??