Early this week in Saudi Arabia, the internet began behaving erratically and slower than usual. I didn’t think much of it having had to stay at a less than premier hotel that while having free wireless, only has 802.11B which is 4 times slower than what I have at home. By the last day of my trip, even leaving my laptop connected all night didn’t result in my emails being sent. When I got back to Dubai, there were rumblings of a cable problem in the Mediterranean. The next day they were saying it would be three days before the problem would be fixed. Finally, it came out that most of the Middle East as well as parts of Asia, particularly India were affected by the cable problem and it would be weeks before internet and phone services to Europe returned to normal. The western press attributed it to a ships anchor damaging the cable and alternate cables were being routed to improve the situation. Interestingly enough Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and countries in that area were unaffected by the problem. It hasn’t brought things to a standstill but it has pretty much taken service levels back to the 90’s with network timeouts and slow\aborted downloads plus some interesting things like having your pages only display in Arabic until you luck onto the correct button to change the language. You never appreciate how much you take things for granted until you experience a setback.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/31/dubai.outage/index.html?eref=rss_world
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