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A Broken Undersea Cable Knocked Mauritania Offline For Two Days, Affected Another Five Nations (fortune.com)
The West African nation of Mauritania lost all internet access for 48 hours due to an undersea cable break, according to infrastructure analysts. From a report: The break, which took place a couple weeks ago, provides a reminder of how much internet users rely on the cables that connect their countries. According to Dyn, the Oracle-owned internet performance firm, the African Coast to Europe (ACE) cable was cut near Noukachott in Mauritania on March 30. It's not clear what caused the break, but six countries entirely rely on that one cable for their connectivity, and all -- Sierra Leone, Mauritania, Liberia, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and the Gambia -- saw a big impact. The impact in Mauritania was the worst, with its two-day outage, while Sierra Leone also had big problems. The latter country also had a big outage on April 1, but that may well have been down to government action -- African governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access, particularly around election time or during periods of unrest.
Really. If it's critical, you have have two internet access points, at least.
More likely than not.
While some (third-world mostly, not only African) governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access during key periods, it's becoming clear that many types of political and commercial organizations, be it in evolved or developing nations, and even entities not associated with government, are becoming proficient in interfering with citizens's internet use - through internet access (e.g. corporate interests from ISPs such as net neutrality), unfair use of information (such as targetted ads), or flat out privacy and freedoms violations (such as Cambridge Analytica, Facebook, IRIS, etc etc). There's absolutely no need to single out African Nations' Governments, since it has become a widespread practice.
At least in African nations things are a lot more transparent - a relevant number of even the most illiterate citizens will see through internet downtime on pre-election days as something planned, and that will, hopefully, affect their voting decision.
The worst kind of influence is the one we don't comprehend, or even get to see. And that's only becoming obvious now thanks to the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it's been here in some form even before internet times, through media, censorship, marketing and lobbying. The only common denominator is that it always emanates from entities with poor ethics and morality.
Quote: African governments are notorious for interfering with citizens' internet access, particularly around election time or during periods of unrest.
Yea. You may want to take a look closer to home, subs. Western governments have been in on this for some time.
https://www.sfgate.com/news/ar...
Because it's the polite way to address them. .ms domain" ;)
".mr domain, meet
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Cue the idiots who mention a wireless tech.
Guys, this is not hard. The undersea cables connect countries because it's more expensive to go over land, and in some cases the land doesn't exist, or is in politically unstable locations.
Like an undersea cable between the US and Asia, has redundancy, but a cable between two African nations? Nope. Go look at the map.
https://www.submarinecablemap.com/
The only African country with redundant cables is South Africa, connected by both the west and east. Everything South of Keyna on the east side and Gabon on the West side has two.
The only less connected region is Alaska.
Perhaps low Earth orbit satellites are a good idea, after all. Except, of course, for that next devastating solar flare.
Indeed, the best signal in all the land! It sure is nice of the sovereign to ensure service at such times and places.......