Connectivity status for Egypt

Fri Jan 28 06:49:01 UTC 2011

On 1/27/2011 9:36 PM, Craig Labovitz wrote:
>
> And to add to this thread, an  graph of Egyptian Internet traffic across a large number of geographically / topologically diverse providers yesterday (Jan 27):
>
> http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5291/5395027368_7d97b74c0b_b.jpg
>
> Traffic drops to a handful of megabits following the withdrawal of most Egyptian ISP BGP routes.
>
> - Craig
>

I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind on the fact that the 
service is being interrupted somehow.  The question is why.

Being an old fart, I tend to dig up stories that explain my point.

Almost two years ago, I woke up one morning and got on my trusty 
computer to read email, etc.  I couldn't reach the Internet.  My 
microwave to my ISP was up but their uplinks were either down or just 
went a few hops and died.  I tried to dial in but that just got a fast 
busy signal.  Calls to the ISP help desks involved via my land line also 
got fast busy or "your call could not be completed".  Now getting a bit 
worried, I dug out my cellphone and had no bars.  Usually I got all of 
them here.

I immediately thought of 9/11 and was speculating that some terrorist 
attack had struck.  I quickly went to the family room and powered up the 
satellite TV.  Everything seemed normal.  No attacks.

You probably know the rest.  30 miles away in San Jose, someone went 
down a manhole and severed some fiber cables.  It turns out that all the 
services involved (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Cogent, etc) all were in that 
manhole. Almost 200,000 people had no communications for most of the day.

Moral of the story: Separate facts from assumptions and guesses.  I did 
some Google searches and that region has had large scale disruptions in 
the past.  Several cables follow the same path to the Suez canal and 
were hit.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption