Slashdot Mirror
Millions in Middle East Lose Internet
Shipwack writes "Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.
The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.
Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with Egypt's communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe."
Sounds like the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable
There was redundancy there. I was talking with a guy from Bahrain when it happened (already suspected a cable problem since I've experienced that with a cross-Atlantic cable already) and he said his ping just went up like mad, he was still able to connect obviously, just with a ping of two seconds.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
A lot more information is available from the Renesys Blog.
It was both the Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WEA 4 cables outside of Alexandria, Egypt. The SEA-ME-WEA 3 cable is apparently OK.
In long distance telecommunications, you really need another path going "the other way around" to be safe. For example, many of the large companies with back-offices in India pay for routes both over the Atlantic to the Middle East to India (which might have been broken by this) and also West Coast to Pacific to Singapore to India (which would not have been).
At AmericaFree.TV, the steady Egyptian audience went to zero yesterday, presumably because of the break, while the audience in Iran, Iraq, the GCC, Pakistan and India did not seem to be affected.
We're a big outfit that spends many millions on network infrastructure, so we have some clout with the various telcos and ISPs. We're all right Jack. You've got to wonder if any small company is going to be able to do the same thing. Presumably most of them will be relying on their ISPs, and those ISPs are presumably also going to prioritise their biggest customers as well...
Seriously given the magnitude of this, /. could have come up with a more factual and informative writeup.
/snip/
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/business/worldbusiness/31cable.html?ref=business
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.
The second cable, known as the Flag (for Fiber-optic Link Around the Globe) System, runs from Britain to Japan.
http://www.ndtv.com/convergence/ndtv/story.aspx?id=NEWEN20080039928&ch=1/31/2008%208:29:00%20AM
Internet service providers in India have put the disruption at 60 per cent of normal services while those in Egypt have been affected up to 70 per cent.
see his brilliant article in Wired on undersea communication cables.
The dodgy internet connection I have in South Africa (yes we are basically at the butt end of internet connectivity...) today every few times my connection drops (I have always on ADSL)... ...and the lack of viagra spam in my spambox this morning...
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
Here's a quick undersea cable map for anyone who's looking.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Odd geography. ITYM
"Fog in the channel - continent isolated".
There is redundancy and the fact that I am posting this message from the United Arab Emirates and that I just exchanged email with my business partner in India, Syria, Saudi and Egypt is a proof of that.
A few cables cut did not make us "lose Internet" (alarmist article, which I didn't read), but the fact that most of the traffic is now redirected through other cable / satellite / smoke signal cause some bandwidth issue and it is much slower than usual.
For example it takes about twice as long as it usually does to log-in my gmail account, watching video on youtube is not realtime anymore. Doing a google search or accessing a local website is fast of course. Slashdot loads a bit more slowly than usual but it reminds me of my 56k modem and it's still faster than my 3g phone. I read about the issue for the first time on bloomberg's website. So saying that the "Middle East" doesn't have internet anymore is pure Yellow Journalism.
Calling europe is a bit of a pain, it's difficult to get through due to network congestion and require at least a couple of redial. Skype calls are too choppy to be useful during peak hours. (It was fine last night when the businesses were closed).
It does have a real impact on some of my customer who relies on internet bandwith (outsourced call center using VoIP for eample), but for everyone else it's business as usual, just a little bit slower.
And honestly, the telecom's operator suck so badly in this area that it doesn't change much from any other "slow internet and shitty phone line" day.
Here is another map, from the same company that made the one on C|Net: http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Make sure the two aren't going down into the same underground conduit.
The canonical example of this was the incident on the morning of 12 December 1986, when the Internet/ARPAnet had seven trunk lines connecting New England to the rest of the US. But all seven lines passed through a single conduit between Newark (NJ) and White Plains (NY). A worker cut the conduit and severed all the cables inside.
This is used as a textbook example of why the layered architecture of such systems shouldn't be absolute. Without software that is able to look at all the layers and compare them, you can't prevent people from making mistakes like this. You need a way for management software to peek into both the network level and the hardware level, and throw a warning if redundancy has been subverted in ways like this.
And a big part of the problem is that major infrastructure suppliers like the phone and cable companies consider this "Someone Else's Problem". They are strongly motivated to minimize their costs, which includes minimizing the hardware and eliminating redundancy. As long as there are profits at stake, such problems can't be solved without an outside actor that can enforce redundancy. Here in the US, as in much of the rest of the world, we don't seem to have anyone able to enforce such redundancy in the non-military "market".
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.