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Egypt Calls for Bandwidth Rationing
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has called upon its citizens to ration their internet usage. This comes after two of its three undersea fiber optic links were recently severed. The cut cables have caused communication difficulties for millions of people throughout the Middle East. Ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur was quoted as saying, 'People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do.'"
The cables in the mideast have all been cut on purpose. When they were first laid out, we did not have as good interception equipment as is now available. However, going down and installing equipment capable of intercepting, duplicating, and analyzing their traffic without increasing latency in the slightest would require an unexplained interruption in service while it was being installed. While the lines are being repaired, further up in a difficult-to-reach location or hub, the NSA is now installing this equipment. Afterwards, they can copy all data sent through the cable without raising any eyebrows. There will be no proof.
One would think that those businesses affected who depend on their network connection would see its value and have the appropriate SLA. Otherwise they should fall under the rest who need to fight over the limited data cause by a lack of investment of inferstructure. I have no sympathy, if line failure means a reduced capacity, that isn't a backup.
God talking heads piss me off some times. Get a clue.
GPLv2: I want my rights, I want my phone call! DRM: What use is a phone call, if you are unable to speak?
It seems that Internet is now making its way up with water food and shelter for human necessities :P
... next thing they do is giving away "bandwidth-stamps".
I am sorry sir, your bandwidth-card is full ; you will have to wait until next month to renew your bandwidth.
Here you go ma'm, one bandwidth stamp for 100 MB worth of data.
Sir, you are hereby under arrest for trying to fraud with bandwidth-cards, you sir are a "bandwidth pirate", a "megabyte thief", a "bit ripper" !
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If they don't keep a stored reserve for emergencies like this, they deserve to be frustrated. With HDDs so cheap these days, there's no excuse for not having a few gigs of porn.
Though I've never looked for an Egyptian site before, my curiousity may have added a little to the problem:
The server at www.egypt.gov.eg is taking too long to respond.
That's accordin to google labs, porn is for UK, New Zealand and Australia where getting sex isn't a problem while sofisticated porn is difficult to see http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 - Sex is clearly what Egiptians are looking for http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
...they'll be asking road users to give way to trucks and business executives on the roads.
Thier concern over how this could impact thier commerce is understandable, but this is not the answer.
Aziz Bandwidth!
When I was in dial-up tech support in the late 90s, we would occasionally get customers who were furious because "my business depends on the internet". Of course we couldn't tell customers what we really thought, so we would all stand outside on break, and be like "your business ha-hah, depends on ha-ha, the INTERNET???". "Well then, you should not have depended on a single provider, if it was really that critical".
It's one thing for some idiot pre-bubble day trader who fancied himself a "business man" to not understand that. In this case, it's a whole region. OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe they're where we were in the 90s. It seems like the whole network would go dark every few weeks or so back then. In the call center they would put up a big sign that said something like "MAE East is down". I haven't seen anything like that for a while. Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Cut cable causes communication catastrophe! Dismal disaster dooms denizens!
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
This isn't a private company, it's the entire country's connection to the rest of the world. As in, the government. And there are redundancies, that's why they can still connect. Two of the three main cables (each over a mile apart) failed simultanously.
That's pretty much what they did. They said there was limited bandwidth, and asked people not to download music and movies because it would eat up bandwidth that might be needed for contining business purposes.
If you read all his comments, it is quite polite and understanding of individuals' rights. You might not think it was polite because it was translated from Arabic. Egypt is a different country than the United States. Many other countries speak languages besides English.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
This might be a more useful comparison. This plot of porn and sex, ranked by sex, shows the countries that are most affected.
And yes, Egypt ranks first, followed by India.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn%2C+sex&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=all&sort=1
Wednesday - MI5 issues report complaining they don't have the tools to intercept internet telephony
Thursday - BOTH Middle-Eastern internet trunk routes that pass near the large British naval base in Cyprus suddenly go dark for a conveniently precise period of one week
Oh, we're subtle, I'll give you that.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
Good luck with that.
A year ago some cables running south of Taiwan were cut by an earthquake. In Hong Kong the immediate effect was to slow down access. But a few hours later, they had reconfigured it so that domestic users, like myself, working at home, got ZERO connectivity, as they gave almost all the capacity to their business clients. I couldn't even check my email, on Yahoo, for a week. And you know that businesses were just sending the same bloated powerpoint files and videos to each other.
IMHO, they should give a minimum connectivity to everyone so you can use email, the most vital of all services. But when they have their big customers screaming at them about how slow their service is, they'll cheerfully cut off home users completely, knowing most have no alternative.
Well if you work on a so-called "global" team. You get to find this out first-hand. Americans are perhaps not the most common-sensical people on the planet, but they certainly have second place.
Middle east is simple : you do what your dad does. If he was a nobel laureate and you failed kindergarten, you head the university. Needless to say, this arrangement has it's problems. Never ask anyone in Egypt why they have a job. They are very open about this you know.
In kuwait the "senior technical designer" of the local telco did not know what a router was. "how do I recognize one ?" - no joke. And I had to explain to the last pakistani that called that just connecting your pc to an -unconnected- router is not going to get you on the internet. Then we got started on bgp. Needless to say, it took a while.
Friday - I'm in love.
Oh come on. How many companies anywhere in the world have a satellite link 'just in case'? Never mind the problem of being able to afford to actually use it.
Most companies will have one DSL connection. Possibly they'll have an ISDN or second DSL available as backup - but that wouldn't help in this case. All that WOULD help would be a satellite link.
The businesses could well be paying more for their Internet link than individuals anyway - we pay about 6 times more for our DSL than a 'home user' account costs. That gives us a lower contention ratio, plus a basic SLA.
Even in the UK, if two of our transatlantic links were severed at the same time, things would slow to a crawl as data gets routed through Germany etc instead. I remember one failing not too long ago and it was very noticeable.
Two out of three failing at the same time is an exceptional event so you can't really expect a developing country to have more than one redundant link available for their two normal ones. How would your region handle the case where **all** their 'normal' Internet links out of the region were severed and they had to fall back to their redundant links???
They're not asking individuals to stop using the Internet at all, just to cut back on all the movie downloads. One movie download is a few hundred thousand emails after all (most of which will be spam..). Also, using the Internet within the country itself would not be a problem
Never heard of this what is it?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. True in politics, and bandwidth allocation. ISPs cannot be trusted to police Internet traffic.