High price of web business

Dubai: Beau Wardak, Tandberg's General Manager in the UAE, was about to give a demonstration of the company's video conferencing system at a hotel on Wednesday night when the internet went down.

That presented no small problem for Wardak. The demonstration involved a three-hour internet-based videoconference between Dubai journalists and the company's Chief Technology Officer, Allen Bjornstad, who was in the Netherlands.

A ship off the coast of Egypt apparently caused the failure. The ship's dragging anchor tore through two fibreoptic cables that connect Western Europe to the Middle East and Asia.

Unfortunately, such scenarios are the price of doing business over the internet.

'Bloodline'

"The information feed is a vital source of doing business," he said. "It is of course necessary to have the network up and running. The network is the bloodline of an organisation. When the networks stops, the blood stops following."

The three-hour conference went as scheduled, but instead of the direct connection the company had planned for, the connection had to be rerouted through the UK. The resulting video and sound quality were not what Wardak had been hoping for.

du and etisalat, the UAE's two telecom providers, said in separate statements that they were rerouting internet traffic to avoid any service interruptions. While some companies said the damaged cables only minimally impacted them, others said the incident has cost them money.

John Stevenson, who works at a company based in Knowledge Village, said the company was faced with losses due to the breakdown of the internet connection.

Employees have been unable to work since Wednesday, and that the management did not receive any updates on when the connection would be restored.

"We are an internet-based company and lost thousands of dollars in transactions because we did not have an internet connection," said Stevenson. "We specifically requested du to update us with their progress, and we have not received any reply from them," he said.

Telephone communication was also disrupted, since the damaged cables also carry voice data. According to Cherif Sleiman, Director of Advanced Technology for Cisco Systems in Dubai, the attraction of fibreoptic cable is its ability to carry any type of information.

"It's all about connecting the right people at the right time, regardless of were they are," he said.

Global cable network

The two cables that were cut, called SeaMeWe4 and Flag, run over a combined 48,000 kilometres. SeaMeWe 4, which simply stands for South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe, runs over 20,000 kilometres and travels from France through the Mediterranean, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to Singapore.

The cable is owned by 16 different telecommunications companies, including etisalat, and directly connects to 14 countries. etisalat is not responsible for maintaining the section of cable that was damaged.

The cable was finished in December 2005 and carries over 1.28 terabytes of information, or the equivalent of 270 DVDs, a second.

The Flag cable, which stands for Fibreoptic Link around the Globe, runs from Britain to the Japan, around 28,000 kilometres. The cable was finished in 1997 and carries about 80 gigabytes of information, or about two-thirds as much as the SeaMeWe 4 cable.