Online tremors
Last week's earthquake in Algeria resulted in an unexpected disruption of a large portion of Egypt's Internet traffic. Reem Nafie investigates the aftershocks
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When FLAG's cable system to Europe was damaged it diverted Internet traffic to its Far East connection; meanwhile surfers crowded Internet cafés to go online
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Just after midnight on 22 May, a submarine cable system linking the Middle East and Europe was damaged, disrupting Internet access and international communication in several Middle Eastern countries, including Egypt, for at least 12 hours. The cause was the 6.7 Richter earthquake in Algeria.
The quake's epicentre was near the underwater cable in the Mediterranean Sea linking Egypt to Portugal -- with the damage there disrupting 20 per cent of Egypt's Internet traffic, affecting key organisations and ordinary citizens alike.
Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that use the Egypt-Europe connection lost their access, which ended up forcing Al-Ahram, the American University in Cairo (AUC), and many private sector companies, as well as private citizens, to abandon most Web-related functions for much of the workday. Other Arab countries -- such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Jordan, Tunisia, Libya, Kuwait and Qatar -- lost up to 50 per cent of their Internet traffic.
"Egypt was among the lucky countries, because it shifted easily to an alternative route," noted Alaa Talaat, Middle East and Africa sales director at FLAG Telecom (Fibreoptic Links Around the Globe), the company that owns the destroyed cable. "Other Arab countries only regained their access gradually after 24 hours."
In July 2000, FLAG Telecom and the National Telecom Company (NTC) signed a pioneer Virtual Point of Presence (VPOP) agreement that resulted in the construction of an Internet Protocol (IP) Gateway connecting Egypt and the Middle East with an additional route that joins Egypt and the Far East via Singapore. While those ISP companies that are connected via the Mediterranean suffered badly last week, others connected via Singapore, or via satellite, were not affected at all.
One of the bigger ISPs that lost access was Nile Online (NOL), one of Egypt's pioneer Internet providers. As one of the country's earliest providers, NOL was nearly fully dependent on the older Egypt-Europe route. NOL Technical Support Manager Omar Shams told Al-Ahram Weekly that the company "dealt with the situation by re- routing our Internet traffic to another line".
Talaat said "other major companies that did not lose their access helped NOL by providing them with temporary network lines which were used to bring Internet access back to NOL's customers." The American University in Cairo (AUC), for example, lost its Internet connection because seven of its nine lines were provided by NOL.
"We regained Internet access a few hours later when NOL took lines from other companies and restored four of our seven lines," said Khaled Hilal, associate director of AUC's Network Services. Hilal also said other ISPs -- like Nour and Raya -- were "very cooperative. We are now operating with six out of nine lines, so we are functioning well, especially considering that demand for the Internet is relatively low because we are near the end of the semester and students are busy with final exams."
For other organisations, like Al-Ahram, it took nearly a day to get the network back to full capacity. "NOL borrowed lines from other companies," explained Omar Sami, Al-Ahram's Internet network manager, "and so we were able to function partially. Now that NOL has shifted to the Far East route, we have regained complete access." The newspaper's publishing cycle, however, did not experinece any disruptions or delays as a result.
The sudden diversion of most of Egypt's Internet traffic to the Singapore route resulted in a temporary slow-down in connection speeds across the board. A group of Cairo University students resorted to a downtown Internet café when they were unable to access the Internet from their homes. "We have final papers to hand in and were unable to log on to the Internet at home," said Mohamed Medhat, an agitated political science senior. "Even here [at the café]," he said, "the Internet is very slow."
For FLAG, restoring the cables carries a high price, both financially and time-wise. "Unfortunately, because the centre of the earthquake was very close to the cable, restoring it could cost around LE60-90 million," Talaat said. The salvage operation could also take up to three weeks, although Talaat said this would not have any impact on users because their connections have been diverted to the Far East cables, as well as a landline cable to Europe.
Directing the company's traffic to the Egypt- Far East route was not an easy task, however, because it needed to be done manually. An engineer was even dispatched to Italy to change the Internet connections based there. Still, according to NTC's International Communications Sector head, Osama Bassiouni, "If FLAG Telecom did not have two sending points the problem would have been much harder to contain. Phone connections were also restored by diverting services to satellite usage."
A few days after the disruption, some of those affected were better able to assess the damage that had been done. The worst affected, perhaps, was AUC. Hilal said that because "much of the educational process is totally dependent on the Internet, losing 7 of our 9 lines definitely brought student and faculty performance levels down. Those students who still had final papers and theses to complete were unable to access the library's online database. Also, no one could access their email accounts, so anyone waiting on information in that regard also experienced delays. Here in the network operation centre, we were basically trying not to panic."
Al-Ahram's Sami, meanwhile, said that the organisation's popular web site "was not affected, since we have a mirror site in America to which we transferred all our work. We usually use this site -- which was founded to serve Arabs in America and Canada - - as a backup during emergencies. Thus, when we lost Internet access here in Cairo we were still able to shift our work over there so that anyone who tried to access the web site had no trouble doing so."
Initial rumors that the Egyptian Cabinet's web access had been affected by the damage to the underwater cable were later revealed to be untrue. Mohmaed Orabi of the Cabinet's Public Relations department explained that because the Cabinet is actually its own ISP, mainly using satellite transmissions, "we had no problems using the Internet at all that day."
