Bandwidth Being Throttled In Bahrain?

mahiskali writes "In light of recent uprising and protests in Bahrain, reports are coming in showing slower than usual internet access across the country. Broadband providers are claiming this is due to high-usage and heavy load, but Twitter is abuzz claiming a government-imposed lockdown. Accounts on the popular media-sharing site Bambuser have reportedly been blocked as well."

Comments

Internet for elite??

[bhagwad]

To those who say that the Internet is only used by a very small percent of people and that individuals "on the ground" don't care about it and that it doesn't bring real change, tell me why censoring the Internet is the FIRST step taken by authoritarian governments when protests arise?

Re:Internet for elite??

[artor3]

Absolutely agree. Only a very small percent of people speak out on Facebook/Twitter/etc., but many times that number read what that small percent are saying. The internet is the ultimate soapbox. Anyone who thinks that the proverbial soapbox is unimportant because only a few people stand up on it is missing the point entirely.

Re:Internet for elite??

[DNS-and-BIND]

Because the bastards in charge spend a lot of their time on the internet as well? And, as members of the ruling class, their horizons are so small as to not be aware of anything outside their own little group?

There's just this idiotic, pervasive belief that "applying twitter" to any problem fixes it. Changing your web page's background to green in solidarity with the people actually accomplishes something meaningful. Go ahead and laugh, there are serious, highly educated people who have faith in this technique and are puzzled when it doesn't work.

Re:Internet for elite??

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the government first deployed police and military forces against the protesters.

Well, it looks different at least.

[Anonymous Coward]

According to this graph from Arbor Networks, http://www.monkey.org/~labovit/bahrain.png the peaks are lower and the valleys are higher. It's fairly clear that there's more interest in using the internet, but something is throttling the bandwidth.

Re:WTF

[dakameleon]

Everyone just started protesting. One guy in Tunisia immolated himself in reaction to overly harsh police treatment, triggered protests there. With their success, Egyptians thought to give it a short, succeeded very visibly. And so the dominoes continue to fall.

Re:Peaceful now...

[MimeticLie]

Peaceful? People have already died. The New York Times was running an article about how the military has taken to the streets to keep order.

Re:WTF

[DigiShaman]

Courage, self confidence, and willing to sacrifice is all that's needed for a revolution to start. But I'm also reminded that while taking down a government is hard, creating a better one in its place is even harder. Egypt isn't out of the woods yet as they're severely wounded with a vacuum of power left in the wake.

Re:WTF

[SuricouRaven]

It's not hardware. The killswitch consists of someone in the government calling every major ISP and politely hinting that they really should pull out all those cables and turn off the routers, otherwise the secret police would be more than happy to kick the doors down and do it for them.

Alternatives

[Ender_Wiggin]

Well if Bambuser is being blocked (and I suspect its a mix of more slashdotting and blocking), there is also Qik and Ustream

Internet acces is the human right

[Max_W]

I modern times the Internet access became the part of of freedom of speech, information and, even, movement.