Pakistan, India Internet Outage--Access Disrupted Again

Internet and telephone traffic between Europe and the Middle East and Asia has been seriously disrupted since Friday when three major underwater data lines were cut in the Mediterranean, according to media reports.

The main damage is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal. The damaged cables include Sea Me We 4 and Sea Me We 3 lines, which connect countries between Singapore and France as well as the Flag FEA cable route, which stretches from the U.K. to Japan, a France Telecom spokeswoman told Network World. A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily.

France Telecom isn't sure what caused the cut, she said. "We have two assumptions. The first is that it could be an underwater earthquake," she said. "Or it could be simply a ship in the area which has cut the cable." The BBC says that some seismic activity was reported near Malta, where the break apparently occurred, shortly before the cut was detected Friday morning. Ships dragging anchors are also known to have cut submarine cables in the past.

The telecom company listed 14 countries affected by the current problem. The Maldives are 100 percent down, followed by India, which has 82 percent disruption. Qatar, Djibouti and the United Arab Emirates were the next most widely affected areas with about 70 percent service interrupted. Disruptions for Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan range from 51 percent to 55 percent. It should be noted that the Internet penetration in Pakistan is about 10% versus 5% Internet penetration in India, according to ITU.

Here are the details of impact from outages reported by France Telecom:

* Saudi Arabia: 55% out of service
* Djibouti: 71% out of service
* Egypt: 52% out of service
* United Arab Emirates: 68% out of service
* India: 82% out of service
* Lebanon: 16% out of service
* Malaysia: 42% out of service
* Maldives: 100% out of service
* Pakistan: 51% out of service
* Qatar: 73% out of service
* Syria: 36% out of service
* Taiwan: 39% out of service
* Yemen: 38% out of service
* Zambia: 62% out of service

Pakistani blogger Masud Reza is reporting that PTCL ITI (Information Technology Infrastructure) is running at 25% reduced capacity. Internet users are experiencing high latency and a degraded service level resulting in extremely low speed on downloads.

TW1 also has the same issue. TW1 (Tansworld 1) relies mainly on the SMW4 western segment.

The impact of the cable cuts is being felt much more in India than its neighbors. For example, 82 percent of India's voice traffic capability to Europe was out of service early Friday, although that situation has now improved, according to reports.

A maintenance boat is en route to the site of the cut, but it will not get there until Monday, and it will take as many as two weeks for the situation to return to normal, according to France Telecom.

This is the second time this year that the Internet services have been disrupted in parts of the Middle East and Asia after damage to undersea cables in the Mediterranean. In January 2008, there was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, a government official told Reuters. There was also disruption in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. India also suffered up to 60% disruption, a national industry body told Reuters news agency in January of this year. Pakistan was affected with TW1 customers suffering the most. PTCL switched its Internet traffic from SMW4 to SMW3.

Jonathan Wright - director of wholesale products at Interoute which manages part of the optical fibre network - told the BBC that the effects of the break would be felt for many days.

"This will grind economies to a halt for a short space of time," he told BBC "If you look at, say, local financial markets who trade with European and US markets, the speed at which they get live data will be compromised."

"If you think how quickly trades can be placed, if they are suffering from bad latency times, then by the time a trade is placed, the market may well have moved on."

"We've lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we're looking at a total blackout in the Middle East," said Mr Wright, according to BBC report.

"These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we're going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet," he added.

"Normally you would expect to see one major break per cable per year. With four you should have an insurance policy. For this to happen twice in one year, on the same cable, is a serious cause for concern."

A second subsea cable to Malta is currently being laid.

More redundancy, multiple routes and better undersea cable protection should be explored to prevent the continuing negative impact of the repeat damage to the undersea cables.

Mobile Internet For Pakistan

With the personal computers and the Internet penetration in Pakistan in single digit percentages and the mobile phone penetration approaching 50%, should Pakistanis still aspire primarily for the Western style PC/Internet access model? The answer to this question is clearly a resounding NO. Here is an opportunity for a strategic leapfrog to ubiquitous Internet connectivity via the most prevalent device owned by the largest number of people--the mobile phone. It makes sense from many perspectives: Device cost, connectivity options, electricity availability, usefulness for the vast majority of people, etc. It seems that the Japanese have already been pursuing the mobile connectivity model with widespread voice and data connectivity through the cell phones, popularity of text messaging, use of cell phone as a gaming/entertainment and payment platform.
While the efforts such as OLPC (One laptop per child) for developing nations including Pakistan are laudable, a similar or even greater focus on robust mobile phones is likely to be a faster and cheaper method to accomplish the OLPC program goals. There is no reason why these robust mobile devices could not be used to help students in their academic pursuits. With new capabilities in mobile phones such as voice recognition, speech-to-text, real time audio, video, and translation, students learning can be enhanced at the same time as higher business productivity
is realized for an increasingly mobile workforce in Pakistan, India, and the rest of the developing world.
The policy makers and planners should initiate public-private partnerships to make mobile Internet a reality in Pakistan. The government should work with the mobile phone companies such as Mobilink and Motorola as well as the Internet giants such as Cisco, Google and Microsoft to ensure that the widespread mobile phones in Pakistan are leveraged to improve education and business productivity.

Conspiracy Theorists on the Internet Outage

Iran has been completely cut off. Israel, Iraq and Lebanon are not affected at all.
With several undersea cables cut within days, the rest of the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia including India and Pakistan are having serious Internet problems. Is all of this just a coincidence? These questions are being raised in various ways and reported by Jerusalem Post and CNN on the causes of this massive outage. Many find it difficult to accept the ostensible reason: Ships dragging anchors cut all of these cables. It seems to be too much of a coincidence. The conspiracy theorists of all stripes are having a field day while others are calling for a serious investigation into the causes to prevent such outages in the future.
Regarding the latest status in Pakistan, blogger Masud Reza is reporting as follows:
"PTCL and TWA-1 both have arranged for additional capacity on SMW4 segment 1 from SingTel. PTCL has successfully brought an STM-4 and three STM-1s in operation whereas TWA1 has been able to acquire four STM-1 circuits from SingTel.
So for PTCL users, things should be near to normal now and for TWA1 things should improve dramatically."
With increasig dependence of the world on the Internet connectivity, such incidents of outages take on special strategic significance. In some instances, Internet connections represent the lifelines of global companies with operations spread over Middle East, Asia and Latin America. World trade and global investments also take a beating in the absence of the Internet. Globalization, whether you like it or hate it, relies greatly on the Internet connectivity. Regardless of the conspiracy theories and theorists, there is clearly a need to understand and improve the reliability of the Internet.

More Internet Woes With FLAG Cable Cut

The Falcon cable, owned by FLAG (Fiber-Optic Link Around the Globe) Telecom, was snapped on Friday morning, according to a BBC report.

This is the second undersea cable that has gone down in two days. This latest cable is believed to lie alongside SWM4 undersea that snapped earlier.
The cause of the latest break has not been confirmed but a repair ship has been deployed, said owner Flag Telecom. FLAG is a 28,000km (17,400 mile) long submarine communications cable that links Australia and Japan with Europe via India and the Middle East. SMW4 is a submarine cable linking South East Asia to Europe via the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East. The two damaged cables mean that the only cable in service connecting Europe to the Middle East via Egypt was the older SMW3 system, according to research firm TeleGeography.

With respect to Pakistan, blogger Masud Reza is reporting from Pakistan as follows:

"PTCL's additional capacity on SMW3 has NOT been arranged yet. I was expecting it to be operational by yesterday evening. I'll update once that has been done.

Update TWA1 has now (finally) an STM-1 from Singtel on SMW3. However, this is unlikely to improve upon the quality of Internet available on TWA1 since the sold bandwidth is above 2Gbps.

Update After failing to procure STM-4 and multiple STM-1 from Telecom Italia, PTCL is now arranging the same from Singtel. Browsing and Emails etc are working fine on PTCL. However, overall, the service is degraded. If this STM4 and three STM-1s become operational, this would add almost 1 Gbps to the available bandwidth for a total of 4.6Gbps. Internet for PTCL customers would then become 'normal'. :-)

Call Centers in Pakistan are suffering the most since PTCL has an unofficial policy of not opening voice ports (SIP ports, for example) even for Legitimate call centers. PTCL forces customers to get bandwidth directly from them if they want to open the Voice Ports. Still working on that."

Internet Outage Affects India, Pakistan, Middle East

Internet services have been disrupted in parts of the Middle East after damage to an undersea cable in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, a government official told Reuters. There was also disruption in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, reported the Associated Press. India also suffered up to 60% disruption, a national industry body told Reuters news agency.

Blogger Masud Reza from Pakistan is reporting that Pakistan is also affected by this outage. Mesud said as follows in his post:
"At approx. 11:30am today, the SMW4 Segment 4 Sumbarine Cable went down due to a fiber cut between Marseille and Palermo due to which the Internet connectivity in Pakistan is severely affected.
At this moment, TWA1 customers are suffering the most. PTCL has switched it's Internet traffic from SMW4 to SMW3.
Let's hope that this fault is repaired soon since degraded Internet service cripples internet for business.
Update: A ship has left Italy for repairing the fault. However, timelines indicated by SMW4 are anywhere from twelve to fourteen days!!"

This latest disruption reminds me of June 2005 outage of ALL Internet access in Pakistan due to damage to the lone undersea fiber optic cable in the Arabian Sea connecting Pakistan with the rest of the world. This cable is owned by a 92-nation international consortium and operated by SingTel, the Singapore telecommunications company. There were satellite link but these links have very limited bandwidth. Even though the number of Internet users in Pakistan is relatively small at about 15-20 million, the impact on business was disproportionate. Traders on KSE reported as much as 80% drop in trading volume from this outage. All call center activities and other BPO vendors were severely affected.

In February 2006, there was another brief disruption when Pakistan’s first undersea fiber optic cable, SMW3, was damaged causing interruption in the country’s Internet and voice traffic. However, there was no breakdown in any part of the country, as the recently-commissioned submarine cable, SMW4, was fully operational. Since then, yet another submarine cable TWA1 has also been added. While the two additional cables have made Pakistan less vulnerable, the growing use and bandwidth requirements in Pakistan will continue to strain these cables, unless additional capacity is added on a regular basis.