[Fetowip]

By Wael Gamal
Egypt has only 40 pct Internet after cables break

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt had less than half its Internet capacity available on Thursday because of breaks in two undersea cables that have also affected the Gulf region and south Asia.
The connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, slowing or stopping Internet access for users across parts of Asia, and forcing service providers to reroute traffic.
Egyptian Telecommunications Minister Tarek Kamel said his country's Internet capacity would reach 45 to 50 percent by the end of the day.
"Capacity will be increased to 75 percent in 48 hours at the most through alternative cables and satellites," he added, at a signing ceremony for a new cable linking Egypt and France.
"Now nearly everyone is connected, but by different degrees. Only call centers still have serious problems."
He said it would take at least a week to fix the breaches, which are in segments of two intercontinental cables known as SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG.
India, home to three companies that have stakes in the cables, said in a statement: "It is expected that the links will be completely restored by the ... operators within 10 days".
The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables ,declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches .
"Investigations are still going on," a spokesman said.
Egypt said it did not know if weather had been a factor. Storms forced Egypt to close the northern entrance to the Suez Canal on Tuesday, making ships wait in the Mediterranean.
SUBMARINE NETWORK
The ICPC says more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite. A single pair of optical fiber strands can now carry digitized information equivalent to 150 million simultaneous phone calls.
One of the biggest disruptions of modern telecoms systems was in December 2006, when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake broke nine submarine cables between Taiwan and the Philippines, cutting connections between southeast Asia and the rest of the world.
Internet links were thrown out in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, disrupting the activities of banks, airlines and all kinds of email users.
Traffic was rerouted through other cables, but it took 49 days to restore full capacity.
While most cable operators say there is enough spare capacity in the network, the ICPC has urged governments around the world to be more aware of its strategic and economic importance when deciding whether to issue permits for the laying or repairing of cables in their waters.
In Cairo on Thursday, some residents said their Internet connections were working at slow speed, while others still had no workable access to the Web.
"Investigations are still going on," a spokesman said.
Egypt said it did not know if weather had been a factor. Storms forced Egypt to close the northern entrance to the Suez Canal on Tuesday, making ships wait in the Mediterranean.
SUBMARINE NETWORK
The ICPC says more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite. A single pair of optical fiber strands can now carry digitized information equivalent to 150 million simultaneous phone calls.
One of the biggest disruptions of modern telecoms systems was in December 2006, when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake broke nine submarine cables between Taiwan and the Philippines, cutting connections between southeast Asia and the rest of the world.
Internet links were thrown out in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, disrupting the activities of banks, airlines and all kinds of email users.
Traffic was rerouted through other cables, but it took 49 days to restore full capacity.
While most cable operators say there is enough spare capacity in the network, the ICPC has urged governments around the world to be more aware of its strategic and economic importance when deciding whether to issue permits for the laying or repairing of cables in their waters.
In Cairo on Thursday, some residents said their Internet connections were working at slow speed, while others still had no workable access to the Web.

The digital blackout disrupted Egyptian financial market operations on Wednesday. Gulf Arab countries and India also reported significant disruptions to Internet connectivity.
Kamel said the $125 million submarine cable deal signed on Thursday by state-controlled Telecom Egypt and France's Alcatel-Lucent would boost network service in the most populous Arab country.
India's Bharti Airtel and VSNL are among the partners in the SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium, and Reliance Communications has a share in the FLAG cable.


(Additional reporting by Charlotte Cooper in Bombay and Georgina Prodhan in Frankfurt; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

© Reuters 2008 All rights reserved

[Suentiend]

This doesn't look like any sort of accident -- not after the THIRD time in one week ...

Third undersea Internet cable damaged in Mideast: Indian firm

breitbart.com
Feb 2, 2008

A third undersea Internet cable has been damaged in the Middle East, adding to the disruption in online services after two other lines were cut earlier this week, the cable operating firm said.

The Falcon cable was cut 56 kilometres (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates, according to its owner, FLAG Telecom, which is part of India's Reliance Communications.

The repair ship had been notified and was expected to arrive at the site in the next few days, the company said on its website.

Flag Telecom owns another cable that was damaged off Egypt on Wednesday. A repair ship was expected to arrive by Tuesday to restore that cable and repairs were expected to take a week, the company said.

The outages have disrupted business across the Middle East and South Asia, including in India, where businesses said it may take up to 15 days to return to normal.

Copyright AFP 2008

[Amomiamup]

I agree, it seems suspicious.

[Hofonom]

Conspiracy theories emerge after internet cables cut

By Simon Lauder
Posted Mon Feb 4, 2008 3:14pm AEDT
Updated Mon Feb 4, 2008 4:03pm AEDT

When two cables were cut off the Egyptian port city of
Alexandria last week, about a 100 million internet users
were affected, mainly in India and Egypt. (AFP: Ammro
Maraghi)

Audio: Third cable cuts 'a bad coincidence' (The World Today)

Is information warfare to blame for the damage to underwater internet cables that has interrupted internet service to millions of people in India and Egypt, or is it just a series of accidents?

When two cables in the Mediterranean were severed last week, it was put down to a mishap with a stray anchor.

Now a third cable has been cut, this time near Dubai. That, along with new evidence that ships' anchors are not to blame, has sparked theories about more sinister forces that could be at work.

For all the power of modern computing and satellites, most of the world's communications still rely on submarine cables to cross oceans.

When two cables were cut off the Egyptian port city of Alexandria last week, about a 100 million internet users were affected, mainly in India and Egypt.

The cables remain broken and internet services are still compromised.

Telecommunications analyst Paul Budde says the situation demonstrates how interconnected the world is.

"It clearly shows we are talking about a global network and a global world that we are living in," he said.

"So wherever something happens we all get, in one way or another, affected by it."

'Information warfare?'

It was assumed a ship's anchor severed the cables, but now that is in doubt and the conspiracy theories are coming out.

Egypt's Transport Ministry says video surveillance shows no ships were in the area at the time of the incident.

Online columnist Ian Brockwell says the cables may have been cut deliberately in an attempt by the US and Israel to deprive Iran of internet access.

Others back up that theory, saying the Pentagon has a secret strategy called 'information warfare'.

But Mr Budde says it is far more likely to be a coincidence.

"It is absolutely strange, of course, that that happens. At the moment it really looks like bad luck rather than anything else," he said.

Telecommunications professor at the University of Melbourne, Peter Gerrand, says Australia is in a far better position than India to withstand a cable breakage.

"We've got, in effect, five really major separate cables, each with high capacity, most of which have plans for upgrading their capacity in the next few years," he said.

Professor Gerrand does not believe Australia is vulnerable to the types of major disruptions that India and Egypt have seen.

"I gather India has most of its capacity on two cables - one's to its west and one to its east - so when the western cable got cut near Egypt, all this traffic had to then pass through a single cable and that's what's caused these very huge delays," he said.

Australia's protection zones

As it happens, Australia's protection against such incidents was boosted just last week.

Activities that could damage submarine communications cables have been prohibited off Perth's City Beach since Friday.

Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) submarine cable protection manager Robyn Meikle says the events in the Middle East highlight the importance of submarine cables to all international communications.

"Here in Australia, over 99 per cent of all of our international communications carried through these cables lie at the bottom of the sea," she said.

"That's why the Australian Communications Authority [ACMA] has played a major role in declaring protection zones over our cables of national significance in Australia.

"Each of the zones, for instance, has restrictions to do with anchoring, which are aimed at preventing the sort of damage that has happened in recent times in the Middle East.

"ACMA declares protection zones over what are considered to be the main cables of national significance, and they're the ones that carry the bulk of the traffic," she said.

"So really, they are the most important cables that the industry relies on to carry all communications in and out of Australia."

*****

Not an unreasonable suspicion considering reports in 2001 that the NSA tapped into an undersea cable. In the present case of service disruption, during the down time a tap may be placed anywhere along the cable without being discovered.

[topbonuscasino]

But is it fair to blame the US?

What other nation could benefit from this? What political faction?

Could this be a private interest? What if this is the RIAA/MPAA or some other group looking to track and trace internet usage?

I can't think of why Egypt and India would be the most important places to disconnect, unless they are just doing a test run......


Spooky though.....

[erepsysoulperj]

Blame it on the SEA RATS

[GoblinGaga]

Pigeons with scuba gear?

[medshop]

Internet cable cuts: More than accidents?

February 6, 2008
By MIKE WENDLAND
Free Press Technology Columnist

There's a growing uneasiness in the global Internet community over a series of crippling Internet blackouts overseas that has resulted from four cuts and disruptions to underwater cables over the past week. While no evidence of sabotage has been forthcoming, the four breaks seem to many observers to stretch the bounds of coincidence.

The cable breaks have been causing a growing buzz on tech blogs and drawing attention from conspiracy theorists, who suspect everything from information warfare to terrorism to sabotage by the United States to take out Internet connections to Iran, whose connectivity indeed has been pretty much blacked out for most of the past week.

The breaks have been in the Middle East and Asia and have caused widespread disruptions, especially in India. They've had little to no effect in the United States, except for users trying to communicate with people in the affected areas. Most of the huge tech firms in India that do outsourced programming and data entry for U.S. and European insurance, banking and medical companies have not been seriously disrupted because they have used alternate land- or satellite-based private connections.

Dragging ship anchors caused by rough waters in the eastern Mediterranean were the initial suspicion, but Egyptian authorities repairing some of the breaks today said they have reviewed onshore cameras of the cable locations and could see no maritime traffic in the area when the breaks occurred.

Two of the severed lines are owned by the India-based FLAG company that has assembled a team of 30, including telecommunication engineers and Egyptian government and Navy officials. They're working on a repair ship at the FLAG Europe-Asia site off the coastal city of Alexandria.

Those breaks have affected more than 85 million Internet users in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Egyptian officials say those breaks may not be fixed until the weekend. Meanwhile, a crew of 50 off the coast of Dubai says it will take them about a week to repair a damaged fiber optic.

The fourth cable linked Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and went out Monday. Officials are unsure what happened, although some reports say there was damage to the power supply system that "lights up" the cable and sends the data streams through the hair-thin strands of glass-like optical fibers. That's expected to take several days to repair.

Despite all the conspiracy speculation, such breaks are not without precedence. In December 2006, seven of the eight Internet cables connected to Taiwan were damaged by an earthquake. Internet communications in much of Asia were disrupted for weeks.

Still, with so much of the globe dependent on Internet connectivity, the breaks are focusing attention on the vulnerability of the oceanic network that handles 95% of the world's Internet and telephone traffic. Colonel R.S. Parihar, the secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India told the International Herald Tribune that the incidents have been a wake-up call to the global telecommunications industry.

"These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables," he said.

*****

Flag Telecom a subsidiary of Reliance Communications Ltd recently launched the building of Next Generation Network [NGN] which will take upto 36 months to build, span across 60 countries in four continents, and become the world's largest submarine cable system serving 5 billion people i.e 5 out of 6 people in the world.

Wikipedia on Next Generation Networking.