In the coming weeks we expect to see a dramatic shift in transit as Lebanese providers move away from expensive and high-latency satellite service to IMEWE-based service.

We can confirm reports of significant but sporadic Internet outages in the Palestinian Territories today.  As many as half of the routed networks of the Palestinian Territories were unreachable (withdrawn from the global routing table), possibly as a result of reported cyber attacks.  These outages are the largest we have observed all year for this country, which normally has a fairly stable Internet.  Impacted networks are located in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Here are a couple screenshots from our Internet Health Portal, which we provide to the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT). During an emergency like Hurricane Irene, this tool provides the US-CERT with critical information about the availability of Internet services across America. Working from lists of impacted customers in each state and county, and lists of correlated outage events, we can supply a lot of useful information about the problems being experienced by enterprises in the affected area. That information can be passed along to state and local governments to aid in prioritization of disaster relief.

We're still piecing together the data that can confirm or deny much of what's been reported overnight, but one thing is clear: something very strange was going on with Tripoli residents' Internet access. Service was restored suddenly in Tripoli, flickered on and off for a couple of hours, and then died, with the majority of the country's international BGP routes withdrawn from service for good measure. Today the routes are back in Tripoli, but ADSL service isn't. This morning we're looking back at this curious overnight episode, and speculate about what might have happened.

]]> http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/08/the-battle-for-tripolis-intern.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/08/the-battle-for-tripolis-intern.shtml Politics Sun, 21 Aug 2011 07:15:00 -0500

The following plot shows the number of Libyan networks (blocks of Libyan IP addresses) that appear in the global routing table. There are typically 16 of these, all routed by Libyan Telecom and Technology (LTT) via Telecom Italia. This week they have suffered some impairment, in groups of 6 or 10, in episodes that typically last no more than a few hours.

There didn't seem to be any pattern to these outages, which took place at all times of the day and night. It seems to suggest power outages, rather than permanent facilities damage, or deliberate action by the government (for suppressing communications, say).

Is it possible that LTT is suffering power outages, and having trouble finding fuel for their generators due to NATO's unofficial fuel blockade of Tripoli?

One reason why the world at large may not have noticed much in the way of Internet impairment: the affected networks don't seem to be the same ones used to access the majority of Internet content from inside Libya. Looking at Google's plots of inbound traffic from Libya, these substantial network outages seem to have had very little impact on the daily traffic curves:

In other words, the handful of Libyan networks that aren't affected by these outages seem to be the same ones that are consistently generating the Google traffic. If you're lucky enough to be an LTT customer in one of these Internet neighborhoods (presumably in Tripoli), your connectivity stays up. Everyone else, well, you're on your own. Time for Internet in a suitcase?.]]> http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/08/libyan-internet-instability.shtml http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/08/libyan-internet-instability.shtml Fri, 12 Aug 2011 10:10:01 -0500
Updated Monday morning to include detailed Syrian network map, and include one-second BGP plots during the day of outage. --jim

Thanks to everyone who's stopped by this week to read about the Internet blackout that affected Syria last Friday. We're always glad to hear your comments, especially when you fill in some of the missing parts of the story that aren't obvious from the data.

A lot of the questions we've received about Syria this week have speculated about a repeat performance of last week's Internet blackout. Would the Syrian Internet get shut off again this Friday, as it was last Friday? Would it be visible in the BGP routing table? Would this become a recurring tactic, just another mechanism for crowd control?

Initial data from Google's transparency report suggest that total traffic was down, even compared to a normally quiet Friday.

But looking at the broader picture, a couple things are clear. First, there was no repeat of last week's event, in which two-thirds of all Syrian networks became flatly unreachable from around the world, an Egyptian-style disconnection at a very fundamental level. This week, while traffic levels were reduced (perhaps throttled or rate-limited, as in Iran), the routes themselves remained intact.

If you wanted to reach a Syrian website Friday, or if a Syrian browser wanted to reach a European website, the paths were known and the lines were open. Whether you could actually get enough bandwidth to upload videos, or make a Skype call, was another story. We've heard some anecdotal evidence that there were connectivity problems. But anecdotes aren't data.

Speaking of data, that's another question we get all the time. How do we examine a market like the Syrian Internet, and make our call about the structural availability of routes to its networks? Let me take a moment and describe some of the technology behind these reports.

This image shows the current state (green: reachable, red: unreachable) of each network prefix in the Middle East this morning, visualized as a packed Hilbert-curve representation. The size of the colored area is proportional to each country's Internet presence, so you can see that Syria's Internet (red block near the top center) is a little smaller than that of Kuwait.

About two weeks ago, Level 3 announced plans to acquire Global Crossing and we blogged on the enormous size and scope of the new entity, which we called Level Crossing. This week, CenturyLink, a regional US phone company, agreed to acquire Savvis. Since CenturyLink also owns Qwest, we are seeing another merger of two Tier-1 Internet providers, a pairing which we'll label Qwavvis. In what follows, we examine the possible business considerations behind the move, as well as the impact on Internet transit customers and Renesys Market Intelligence rankings.

On Monday, 11 April 2011, Level 3 announced they had entered a definitive agreement to acquire Global Crossing. According to the Renesys Market Intelligence rankings, this merger would bring together the world's #1 and #2 global providers, with over half the Internet market on earth dependent on the combined entity. If the deal gained regulatory approval in the US and elsewhere today, how would the Internet provider landscape change? We'll answer that question in this blog, giving the proposed union a fictional name of Level Crossing for the purposes of our discussion.