Internet outages hit India, Middle East
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India's lucrative outsourcing industry struggled Thursday to overcome Internet slowdowns and outages after cuts in two undersea cables sliced the country's bandwidth in half.
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Weird internet behaviour. What's going on? SÃ»nnet Beskerming researchers observed an interesting deviation in global network traffic over the last 24 hours, particularly for South American, Asian, and Australian networks. Normally, global Internet traffic (as observed by the Internet Traffic Report) oscillates around nine per cent packet loss, with global response times of 138 ms, and the internally derived traffic index at around 79.â¦
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On Wednesday, Internet traffic to Middle Eastern countries through two international data pipelines was greatly reduced or totally severed, as a result of breaks in undersea cables.
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Flag Telecom will start repairs next week on a damaged submarine telecommunications cable linking Egypt and Italy. A repair ship is expected to reach the site of the damage, 8.3 kilometers from Alexandria, Egypt, on Tuesday. The repair will take a week to complete, Flag Telecom said Friday.Breaks on Wednesday in the Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable, owned by India&#39;s Reliance Communications, and on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, owned by a consortium,&#160;disrupted Internet and other communications to the Middle East and India.Flag said the Europe-Asia cable was cut at 8 a.m. GMT on Wednesday. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.A large number of customers in India were shifted by their service providers from the Middle East links to Asia-Pacific routes. But the new routing increased the time-lag heard on long-distance telephone calls, and also led to degradation of Internet service to the U.K. and the East coast of the U.S., said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers&#39; Association of India (ISPAI).Some analysts said that consumers and smaller customers were suffering even as providers tried to meet their service-level agreements (SLAs) with large corporate customers.The Indian government announced late Thursday that Indian service providers, including members of the SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium, are in constant touch with Telecom Egypt to ensure the speedy repair of the SEA-ME-WE 4 and Flag cables connecting India to Western Europe. Repairing this type of submarine optical fiber cable typically takes 15 days, but the Indian ministry of communications and information technology expects this link will be completely restored within 10 days.Another submarine Internet cable owned by Flag Telecom, the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, was cut on Friday at 6 a.m. GMT, at a location 56 kilometers from Dubai, Flag said Friday. A repair ship has been notified, and is expected to arrive at the site of the damage in the next few days, the company said.
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Home to some 1.5 billion people, South Asia is paying a high price to access the Internet as service providers have been slow to deliver cheaper broadband connections, analysts say.
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Service interruptions reported across the U.S.
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Traffic has returned to normal on undersea Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea and Persian Gulf that were cut last month, causing disruptions across the Middle East and parts of Asia, cable owner FLAG Telecom said Monday.
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AT&T Inc.'s EDGE data network suffered a partial disruption in the U.S. today, with users in some states saying they had no network access at all.
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Start from scratch Datanet, the UK business ISP, suffered a power outage in of its server racks this morning which crocked its customers' internet access and email for most of the day.â¦
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Global news and information provider  Reuters Group Plc RTR.L said on Tuesday it had experienced a  power outage in London that disrupted service to an unspecified  number of products and customers worldwide.
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COLOMBO: Over 23,000 people were killed and some 5,200 injured after a tsunami slammed into coasts from India to Indonesia... NEW DELHI: Huge waves that battered the Indian coastline after an earthquake in
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In India and Sri Lanka, panic swept regions struck by the tsunami disaster after the Indian government warned that fresh tsunamis might strike.
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By Middle East and North Africa Business Report, Amman, Jordan  Feb. 26--Bayt.com, the Middle East's number one job site, has said that the internet is growing in profile as an important medium for recruiters and jobseekers in the Arab world.
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Several people have died and crops have been damaged as temperatures fall to unusual  lows across the Middle East.
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Two underwater cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday morning, dragging Internet connections throughout the Middle East and in parts of Asia to a crawl.The cables, one operated by Flag Telecom and the other by a consortium of 15 telecommunications operators, account for 75 percent of the network capacity between Europe and the Middle East, according to Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography Research.A third cable was undamaged, but it is older and has far less capacity than the others, he said.Operators believe the damage was caused by ship anchors during a heavy storm at sea, Beckert said. Wire services reported that ships heading for Egypt&#39;s northern coast were diverted due to the storms, and their anchors may have severed the cables several miles from shore.AT&amp;T confirmed that its service to some areas of the Middle East was affected, but said it was now re-routing traffic. Etisalat, the telecommunications provider in the United Arab Emirates, reported that both Internet traffic and international voice calls were affected by the incident. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, India and all of the Gulf states were affected, Beckert said.As much as 70 percent of Egypt&#8217;s Internet network was down, and over half of India&#39;s bandwidth was cut due to the disruption, according to a report from Reuters that cited local officials.Most of the major operators have backup plans in place for this type of incident, Beckert said. In this case, they&#39;ll have to route traffic from the Middle East to Asia, across the Pacific Ocean, through the U.S. and then across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, he said. That will result in latency problems that will likely lead to sluggish connections until the cables are repaired, he said. The operators in the Middle East told him that they should be able to repair the damages in one to two weeks.The accident should affect mainly Internet traffic. Voice calls travel over the same cables, but operators will give priority to the voice calls, which take up relatively little capacity but produce more revenue than data traffic. Beckert estimates that 1 percent or less of traffic carried on the cables is voice.
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The millions of pilgrims in Mecca this week for the Hajj, an annual gathering of Muslims, can stay connected thanks to a temporary Wi-Fi mesh network covering a large part of the city.Hajjis, as the pilgrims are called, come to the city in Saudi Arabia from around the world for several days of religious rituals. More than 2 million gather each year. A network of about 70 meshed routers from Tropos Networks has been set up to provide free Internet connectivity, according to Denise Barton, director of marketing at Tropos. Users only have to register before using it. Barton believes it is the first public Wi-Fi network set up for the Hajj.Mesh networks are well-suited to temporary deployments because they need fewer fixed-line connections than do traditional Wi-Fi systems. Packets can hop from one router to another until they reach one that&#39;s connected to a landline. The technology has also been used for permanent municipal Wi-Fi networks, including the one Google had built with Tropos equipment in its hometown of Mountain View, California.Saudi Arabia&#39;s Communications and Information Technology Commission appointed an Internet service provider, Bayanat Al-Oula, to provide the temporary network. It was rolled out in less than 60 days with no help from Tropos personnel, Barton said. Aptilo Networks, a wireless-management software and services company based in Stockholm, is running the network as a managed service from its offices in Malaysia. This also helped Bayanat get the infrastructure up and running quickly, said Per Knutsson, Aptilo&#39;s co-founder and director of product development. Aptilo is handling user authentication, security, customer-support calls and other features, as well as setting up the portal visitors use to register for the network.Aptilo and Tropos are no strangers to temporary Wi-Fi networks. Aptilo has managed systems for large sporting events, and in 2004 Tropos built a network in downtown Redwood City, California, for a high-profile murder case. The trial of Scott Peterson, who was convicted of killing his wife and their unborn child, drew massive public and media attention. The county court where the trial took place set up a temporary network with five surveillance cameras and five meshed routers for its own security needs and for reporters who descended on the area for several months.The Mecca network is made up of Tropos 5210 mesh routers, which use IEEE 802.11a for mesh connections and can support users with 802.11a, b and g devices, Barton said. Such networks typically require between 20 and 40 routers per square mile, she said.
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Obituaries for newspapers are already being written in the United States and much of Europe, with the rise of the Internet and shrinking attention spans listed as the causes of death. But the news hasn't made it to India.