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| Arabia |
| Damaged Cable Cuts Internet in Mideast |
| 2008-01-30 |
| Internet outages disrupted business and personal usage across a wide swathe of the Middle East on Wednesday after an undersea cable in the Mediterranean was damaged, government officials and Internet service providers said. In Cairo, the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said the cut in the international communications cable had led to a partial disruption of Internet services and other telecommunications across much of Egypt. Emergency teams were quickly trying to find alternative routes, including satellite connections, to end the disruptions, Minister Tariq Kamel said. But service was still slow or nonexistent by late afternoon Wednesday. A telecommunications expert at the Egyptian communications ministry, Rafaat Hindy, said the government was "engaged in efforts to try and overcome the consequences of the problem" but cautioned that "solving this could take days." "Despite this being an international cable affecting many Gulf and Arab countries, we are closest to it and so we have a lot of responsibility," he said. "We are working as fast as we can." Internet service also was disrupted in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, which markets itself as a top Mideast business and luxury tourist hub. Both Internet service providers said international telephone service was also affected. One of the ISPs, DU, was completely down in the morning; browsing remained very slow even after DU restored Internet service by the afternoon. DU attributed the disruption to a fault in "two international cable systems" in the Mediterranean Sea but gave no details. An official who works in the customer care department of DU blamed a fault on a submarine cable located between Alexandria, Egypt, and Palermo, Italy. It was not clear what caused the damage to the cable. The official, who identified himself only as Hamed because he said he was not authorized to speak publicly, said he could not describe the technical fault but that engineers contracted by DU were working to solve the problem. By early afternoon, the service was flooded with complaints and had found alternative routes but Hamed said "there is slowness while browsing on the Internet." There was no total outage in Kuwait, but service was interrupted Tuesday and Wednesday. The Gulfnet International Company apologized in an e-mail Wednesday to its customers for the "degraded performance in Internet browsing." In Saudi Arabia, some users said Internet was functioning fine but others said it was slow or totally down. A staffer at a Saudi ISP said that they were told that a cable rupture was the cause of the problem, which began early Wednesday. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media. Calls to Saudi Telecom went unanswered Wednesday afternoon, the start of the weekend in Saudi Arabia. Users in Bahrain and Qatar also complained of slow Internet. Associated Press Writer Barbara Surk contributed to this report from Dubai, United Arab Emirates. OK, I'll propose the first conspiracy theory that presses all the hot buttons in the area: W ordered Israel to tap into Mideast |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #8 Where are all NorK's lines? |
| Posted by: gorb 2008-01-30 23:19 |
| #7 Hmmmmmm....there are some good dredging possibilities in the Med, Red, and Persian Gulf from that map, Pappy. If ya get my drift.... |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2008-01-30 23:08 |
| #6 World cable map here |
| Posted by: Pappy 2008-01-30 22:25 |
| #5 Nothing to see here. Go about your business. Never mind that new "repair box" on the sea floor |
| Posted by: Halliburton Data Mining Division 2008-01-30 17:28 |
| #4 In addition, Egypt is probably the gateway for Europe-Mideast traffic via the Red Sea. Europe-Israel cables are not likely to go any further. Same for Leb cables not going to Syria and beyond. |
| Posted by: ed 2008-01-30 16:41 |
| #3 The network is indeed designed to work around breaks. But the robustness and bandwidth of the surviving network is a function of the physical infrastructure which carries the packets of data. 'Internet' means 'between networks'. In most cases, the various networks that are linked together into the public internet have lots of cross connections. But there are places where traffic is routed through one or two big pipes, as across oceans. And how interconnected c.f. Egypt would be with other infrastructure is a function of cost and openness, both of them mitigating against the kind of infrastructure redundancy that north America, Europe and Asia enjoy. |
| Posted by: lotp 2008-01-30 16:36 |
| #2 Something is not 'kosher' here. The internet by design was suppose to survive a nuke exchange. The network design was to skip around physical links or routers which went to the hereafter. Now one cable break shuts out the Mideast? |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2008-01-30 16:23 |
| #1 Oh-oh. Goat P0rn Anonymous better get that hotline number out there... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2008-01-30 16:14 |
