.. if the bandwidth of entire regions, from Egypt to India is affected by some underwater cables!
The quality of internet service has been horrible for the past two days. In Kuwait Wednesday morning, I felt how slow everything was. Today, Thursday, in Jordan things have also been pretty bad.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Web disturbances set to continue:
Disruption to internet services in south Asia and the Middle East is continuing the day after Mediterranean undersea cables were damaged.Operations outsourced to India from the UK and US are badly hit, said an industry body, adding that 50% of India’s bandwidth was affected.
Egypt has about 40% of its internet capacity, following damage to a cable thought to be off its northern coast.
It could take a week or more to restore full services, say experts.
Further disruption has been reported in Qatar, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
And what about Jordan?
Businesses and people in our region depend on the net. It’s not a luxury anymore. And this incident has shown that all of this is hanging by a thread, almost literally.
This is truly a joke.
Comments
6 responses to “The internet is a joke!”
Well, yeah. The internet was never designed to be international. It was meant to take advantage of the redundancy of the US telephone network to be a robust networking system that the Soviets couldn’t take down with military strikes.
That redundancy simply doesn’t exist, internationally. The only way to fix it is to build a redundant system of undersea cabling. Expensive (big time), but certainly possible.
I wonder why Al Gore didn’t design it better?
The internet is redundant, and in fact this is an absolutely marvellous show of how it just keeps working even when serious errors happen.
The entire region here is connected to the internet backbone with 3 cables stretching out to Paris, Frankfurt, and New York. The cables to paris and frankfurt have been cut and so, everything is being routed through new yok which explains the very slow times.
Extending more cables to provide even better redundancy will never happen because the usual customer (you and me), prefer to have a week of slow internet, even a few days of no internet rather than pay 3, 10, or whatever times the price.
And, even if all 3 cables were cut, the internet is designed to be autonomous. Meaning that even if a complete fragmentation happens, and you have multiple separate networks, each of these networks should be able to function as if all services are still available. True that some resources will be unreachable, but every network should have its own services to keep it running and local ISPs have what it takes.
The only problem is, we want the data that is NOT residing on our network
Faisal,
Thanks for the great explanation. I am fully aware how resilient the Internet Protocols are. As you said, they are a marvel of human innovation.
However, the is clearly an issue here in the region. We need more redundancy. This outage has revealed a serious shortcoming in the regions data connectivity.
I read today that another cable snapped in the gulf and that things are getting worse not better.
It will be a tough week it seems.
i guess this better shows how dependent we are in this region!!
Ahmad, I want the post about your saudi arabia trip
… I’m looking forward to know what do you think about it …