Business | Technology
Still cut off from Europe
This is the third time this year cables connecting East and West have been cut, and these two, SeaWeMe-3 and SeaWeMe-4, carry around 75 per cent of Internet traffic between Europe and the Middle East.
- By Scott Shuey, Chief Reporter
- Published: 23:39 December 26, 2008
It was the week before Christmas, and if you wanted to send a Happy Holidays message to someone on the other side of the world, you were better off relying on a fat man in a flying sleigh than on the Internet.
Ok, that's a bit of stretch, but following the break last week of two Internet cables in the Mediterranean, that's what it felt like.
This is the third time this year cables connecting East and West have been cut, and these two, SeaWeMe-3 and SeaWeMe-4, carry around 75 per cent of Internet traffic between Europe and the Middle East.
It was just another unpleasant reminder that no matter how advanced our technology has become, it can all be brought down by the anchor of a ship or a small underwater earthquake.
I became aware of the problem last Thursday (December 19) when I was unceremoniously "dced" (disconnected). My initial response was certainly not in the Christmas spirit, but a quick check on some local Internet sites showed they were still working. Websites in Europe and America, however, were inaccessible.
I was not impressed with statements that the UAE was "unaffected" by the cable break. Just because we can still access content locally doesn't mean we're unaffected.
Not being able to access anything west of Italy has a huge impact on what I do. To be fair, local telecoms quickly rerouted internet traffic to Europe, and while service was at times slow, I was still able to get through again within a day.
But the lag (properly called latency, which is the amount of time it takes a website to respond to your computer) was atrocious thanks to all the traffic on the "detours" that were set up.
The normal lag time between my computer and a European website is usually under a half (0.5) of a second, but last week the lag jumped as high as 20 seconds.
Now, if you're just surfing the web, waiting that long isn't going to kill you, but for companies that relay on continual connectivity, 20 second is an eternity.
Banks were the worst hit, but they weren't the only ones. Websites that rely on advertising, online retailers who need customer traffic, and business people who need to access remote networks also suffered.
My big complaint was iTunes. My mother sent me an iTunes card for Christmas present. Christmas wasn't exactly ruined, but I wasn't happy about having to wait four hours for a 20 minute TV show to download.
The company that owns and maintains the cables, a consortium of about 40 telecoms, said they expected the lines to be repaired by Christmas. But there was no holiday miracle, despite the efforts of a robot named Hector.
The company that owns and maintains the cables ... said they expected the lines to be repaired by Christmas. But there was no holiday miracle ...
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