‘Crecimiento’ in Latin America
| Two weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of visiting Medellin, Colombia to present at the Latin American and Caribbean Network Operators Group (LACNOG) portion of LACNIC 19. Medellin is a vibrant place, recently recognized as the world’s most innovative city by the Urban Land Institute due to the city’s investments in public infrastructure and civic spaces. |  |
Perhaps equally innovative is Colombia’s Internexa, which in recent years has been building the region’s first international terrestrial telecommunications network. Meanwhile, another remarkable regional story is the exponential growth of the domestic Internet in Brazil — especially when contrasted with the stagnation in Mexico. While government initiatives in Brazil, the region’s largest economy, were able to foster much of its recent growth, the current regulatory overhaul in Mexico hopes to achieve something similar in the region’s second largest economy.
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Cuba-Jamaica Link Activated
| In January, we reported the news that the ALBA-1 submarine cable connecting Cuba to Venezuela had started carrying Internet traffic two years after its construction, answering the question of what happened to the mystery cable to Cuba. |  |
Intrigue Surrounds SMW4 Cut
It has been a rough few weeks for the global Internet, given numerous submarine cable failures and the largest DDOS attack ever reported. While we’re hard-pressed to find evidence of the purported global Internet slowdown due to the DDOS attack, the dramatic impacts of yesterday’s SMW4 submarine cable cut were profound. Recent reports that the cable break was the result of sabotage make the incident even more intriguing. In this blog, we detail what happened to some of the providers in four countries along the route of the cable: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India.
Cyber Escalation in Korea?
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On Friday, we published a blog confirming a disruption in Internet connectivity affecting the Internet of North Korea. This morning, South Korean authorities reported that they have been the victims of a cyber attack which impacted TV News organizations as well as banking institutions. Renesys can confirm that at least some of today’s incidents escalated to the point of global visibility, as both South and North Koreans networks experienced actual disconnections. We note similarly timed outages affecting South Korea’s largest natural gas company. |
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North Korea Suffers Outage
| Earlier this morning, North Korea accused the United States of conducting a cyber attack that disrupted their Internet connectivity. While the details remain unknown, we can confirm that, in the last two days, North Korea’s sole Internet provider has had ongoing problems staying connected to the global Internet. We’ll summarize some of our evidence in this blog entry. |
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Faraway Fallout from Black Sea Cut
| Last month, Wired.com‘s fascinating geological sciences blog, Eruptions, cast doubt on the purported cause of the December 23, 2012 failure of the Georgia-Russia submarine cable. That is, the author of the Eruptions blog post thought it unlikely to have been due to an undersea volcanic eruption. Without weighing in on the likelihood of active volcanoes in the Black Sea, we tweeted about some of the Internet impacts of this incident, although in 140 characters, we could only scratch the surface. |  |
Bangladesh Connects via India
| The Internet of Bangladesh has been connected to the world by a single submarine cable, Sea-Me-We 4 (SMW4), since this 18,800 kilometer-long optical-fiber system made its landing at Cox’s Bazar in 2006. However, in the nearly seven years since SMW4′s activation, national Internet outages have plagued Bangladesh with some regularity. When their portion of this system is sabotaged, suffers a failure or is down for maintenance, virtually all Internet bandwidth for the 7th most populous country in the world disappears, forcing local providers to fall back to slow and expensive satellite services or to simply wait for restoration.However, recent national outages due to planned SMW4 maintenance have revealed that some Bangladeshi providers have now activated a long-awaited second connection to the Internet via a terrestrial link to India. We’ll examine this new development here and highlight those providers who can now offer fault-tolerant Internet service for the first time in Bangladesh. |  |
Cuban Fiber: Completo?
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Cuban Internet connectivity continues to evolve by the hour, with a new, faster mode of operation in evidence as of this morning. Our measurements from around the world suggest that Cuban technicians may have completed the work they began a week ago, creating the first bidirectional Internet paths that are free of satellite connectivity. |
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Mystery Cable Activated in Cuba
Recent developments captured in a new blog here. (January 22, 2013)
| In February 2011, the first submarine cable connecting the island nation of Cuba to the global internet (by way of Venezuela) landed on Siboney beach, Santiago de Cuba. In the two years since, the fate of the cable has been a mystery for Cuba observers. In the past week, our global monitoring system has picked up indications that this cable has finally been activated, although in a rather curious way, as we explain below. |  |
Hurricane Sandy: Global Impacts
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In our recent posts about Hurricane Sandy, we analyzed the impacts of the super storm on Internet connectivity in the northeastern US.
From locations around the globe as varied as Chile, Sweden and India, |