February 04, 2008

Here's a question on the internet cable damage ..

This outtage does not appear to effect the UAE . DUBAI. Strategically important Dubai is.

Now .. just what if - the entire point of this exercise is to see strategically how people find ways to work around a damaged internet, living Dubai as a hub to process the information?

Someone was on here yesterday from Japan trying to figure out low cost ways to access Azerbejain .. yup, seriously. The business of business must go on!!

Veeger

UAE unaffected by fourth internet cable break

by Dylan Bowman on Monday, 04 February 2008

UAE telecoms Etisalat and Du said on Monday they have not been affected by the second undersea cable damaged off the UAE coast that caused massive disruption to internet services in Qatar over the weekend.

Qatar Telecom (Qtel) said on Sunday a cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, the fourth reported in the Middle East in less than a week.

RELATED: Internet problems continue with fourth cable break


The damage caused major problems for internet users in the Gulf Arab state, but Qtel's loss of capacity has been kept below 40% thanks to what the telecom said was a large number of alternative routes for transmission.

"Etisalat is not affected by the most recent cut," a spokesperson told ArabianBusiness.com.

"We has not been affected by this at all," a Du spokesperson added.

The cause of damage is not yet known, but ArabianBusiness.com has been told unofficially the problem is power related and not the result of a ship's anchor cutting the cable, as is thought to be the case in the other three incidents.

It is expected to take at least "a few days" to fix, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.

It had been feared the damaged cable would further disrupt UAE internet services.

Parts of the Gulf Arab region were plunged into a virtual internet blackout on Wednesday when two undersea cables were cut near Alexandria, on Egypt’s north coast.

The initial breaches were in segments of two intercontinental cables known as Sea-ME-We-4 and Flag Europe-Asia.

The situation was made worse on Friday when Flag, part of India's Reliance Communications, revealed a third cable, Falcon, had also been damaged off the UAE coast.

Etisalat said it does not use the Falcon cable and is therefore unaffected, but Du had warned the damage could hamper its efforts to restore normal service to customers.

Du said on Monday that its internet and telephone services were now largely back to normal.

"Our internet access is almost back to normal... and data services are 100% restored," Mahesh Jaishankar, executive director for business development and marketing, told reporters.

Qatar reports new damage to Gulf undersea cables

DOHA (AFP) — An undersea telecoms cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged, disrupting services, telecommunications provider Qtel said on Sunday, the latest such incident in less than a week.

The cable was damaged between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das on Friday, Qtel's head of communications Adel al Mutawa told AFP.

Cables were also damaged last week in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Dubai, causing widespread disruption to Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and south Asia.

The cause of the damage is not yet known.

Mutawa said Qtel's loss of capacity had been kept below 40 percent over the weekend thanks to what he said was Qatar's large number of alternative routes for transmission.

The UAE telecommunications watchdog said disruption to Internet and telephone services in the Gulf state was likely to continue for 10 another days.

UAE telecoms provider "du" said in an statement on its website that the owners of the Mediterranean cables, FLAG Telecom and SEA-ME-WE4, were fixing the damage.

"While no schedule is available yet for the repair, initial estimates indicate it will take two weeks to repair the FLAG cable," the statement said.

"du has already started transfering Internet and international voice traffic through other cable systems that have not been affected, although some congestion may be expected at peak times until the issue is resolved."

The UAE's other telecoms provider, Etisalat, and Saudi Arabia's STC said they had not been affected.

Egypt's ministry of communications said on Saturday that Internet disruption would last another 10 days.

A repair ship was expected to begin work to fix the two cables in the Mediterranean Sea on Tuesday. They were damaged on Wednesday, rupturing connections not only in Egypt but also thousands of kilometres away.

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