Damage done early Wednesday to two
underwater telecommunications cables in the
Mediterranean Sea has reduced Internet
capacity in Egypt by 60 percent, and by about 50
percent in Saudi Arabia and India. Large
sections of the Middle East, North Africa and
South Asia were entirely without Internet access
on Wednesday, and authorities say it could take
a week to fix the problem and get service back to
normal.
In some places, international telephone service
has also been affected.
Authorities are still not sure how the two undersea cables were damaged, but one
theory is that they were hit by a ship’s anchor.
The disruption to telecommunications has affected businesses throughout the
Middle East and South Asia, including India’s lucrative customer-service callcenter
industry. Slowdowns were reported on the Dubai stock exchange
Wednesday, but backup measures kicked in Thursday to bring things mostly
back to normal.
Local companies say although their productivity is being affected by slow
Internet speeds, they are relieved that the total outage was limited to a single
day.
The Bahna Engineering Company of Egypt does a lot of business with foreign
companies and international joint ventures, and on Wednesday its staff found
themselves scrambling to deal with orders and contract tenders via fax machines
and telex.
"I think if it had gone any longer than it did, if they had not started fixing it by
today, then it would have been a major problem," said George Bahna, one of the
company’s directors.
The telecommunications problems are affecting countries from Egypt to India
and in between, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Analysts
call the outage "a wake-up call" regarding the vulnerability of the
communications technology infrastructure in the region. They say governments
should take steps to protect it.
An Egyptian man tries to access
a website at an internet cafe
during disruption of the internet
service in Cairo, 31 Jan 2008
Some places, however, appear to have been better-prepared.
"I work out of Internet City where we have a good backup system whenever this
situation does arise," said Rola Zaarour, a communications manager for the
Intel Corporation based in Dubai. "And because I work for a technology
company, we have our own systems that ensure that we are not affected by such
outages, so I would say that our business has not been affected at all by this
outage."
The lengths that some large multi-national companies go to in order to avoid
being crippled by a major Internet outage illustrates the degree to which modern
companies depend on their telecommunications systems.
Bahna says it is virtually impossible to do business these days without the
Internet.
"It has really changed the way that the entire world works, I mean
communications in general," said Bahna. "Look at mobile phones, for example. I
remember before mobile phones, and everyone managed to get along just fine."
"But now if you take my mobile phone away from me for two days, I am totally
lost. I don’t know, I think culture has changed because of that - not only business
culture but social culture, the way that people interact and the way that people
run their lives has been affected greatly by the technology," he added.
Egyptian officials say the cables appear to have been cut north of the port city of
Alexandria, but bad weather prevented boats and divers from being able to get
to the area right away to assess the damage.