January 2008 Archives

After looking at the countries most impacted by the cable cut in our first blog on this topic, we now turn our attention to the Internet service providers in the region and how they fared. Due to differences in network architecture, cable ownership, and transit purchasing, carriers in the same country may not all experience the same degree of outage. For all of the following, we consider a network to be "outaged" when it is unreachable from the perspective of the broader Internet—as represented by Renesys's 250 peering sessions.

The following two tables provide the top 15 providers with the largest number of outaged networks. We list the provider's name, the country in which most of their unreachable networks are located and their autonomous system number (ASN), an assigned number that uniquely identifies their organization on the Internet.

In the first table, we list the providers in decreasing order by total number of outaged networks. In the second table, we list them by decreasing order of the percentage of their networks that are unreachable.

Not surprisingly, the hardest hit providers are located primarily in the hardest hit countries: Egypt, Kuwait, India and Pakistan. One local provider in each of Egypt and Kuwait lost essentially all of their Internet connectivity.

Early this morning local time, two cable systems north of Alexandria, Egypt were severed, greatly impacting both Internet and voice traffic to the region. The broken cables are operated by Flag Telecom and SEA-ME-WEA 4, and if past undersea cable cuts are any measure, repair time will be measured in weeks, not days. This is a preliminary report on the countries most impacted by this failure, as seen from the perspective of Internet routing.

15th Century Routing

Which way is up?

Since I sometimes find myself hopelessly lost, I tend to wonder about global navigation in the days before GPSes or even accurate maps. I imagine you started off with just a general idea of where you wanted to go (e.g., "The New World"), crude navigational aids (the stars, Sun and Moon when you could see them), and hearsay from your fellow travelers or the locals about your proposed course. In addition, you only had a view of the world from your current location, limited by the curvature of the earth.

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About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from January 2008 listed from newest to oldest.

September 2007 is the previous archive.

February 2008 is the next archive.

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