Egypt Calls for Bandwidth Rationing

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Egypt's Ministry of Communications and Information Technology has called upon its citizens to ration their internet usage. This comes after two of its three undersea fiber optic links were recently severed. The cut cables have caused communication difficulties for millions of people throughout the Middle East. Ministry spokesman Mohammed Taymur was quoted as saying, 'People should know how to use the Internet because people who download music and films are going to affect businesses who have more important things to do.'"

Business more important than my porn? NO!

One would think that those businesses affected who depend on their network connection would see its value and have the appropriate SLA. Otherwise they should fall under the rest who need to fight over the limited data cause by a lack of investment of inferstructure. I have no sympathy, if line failure means a reduced capacity, that isn't a backup.

God talking heads piss me off some times. Get a clue.

Internet the new water food and shelter...

It seems that Internet is now making its way up with water food and shelter for human necessities :P

I see it already...

... next thing they do is giving away "bandwidth-stamps".
I am sorry sir, your bandwidth-card is full ; you will have to wait until next month to renew your bandwidth.
Here you go ma'm, one bandwidth stamp for 100 MB worth of data.
Sir, you are hereby under arrest for trying to fraud with bandwidth-cards, you sir are a "bandwidth pirate", a "megabyte thief", a "bit ripper" !

Adding to the problem...

Though I've never looked for an Egyptian site before, my curiousity may have added a little to the problem:

The server at www.egypt.gov.eg is taking too long to respond.

Re:Adding to the problem...

Have we ever slashdotted an entire country before?

Why not?

Aziz Bandwidth!

Re:Why not?

* cables fixed *
Ah, thank you aziz.

This just in!

Cut cable causes communication catastrophe! Dismal disaster dooms denizens!

Re:No more pr0n

If they don't keep a stored reserve for emergencies like this, they deserve to be frustrated. With HDDs so cheap these days, there's no excuse for not having a few gigs of porn.

Re:No more pr0n

No more pr0n for Egypt. Or 2-6 pics per person per day. Poor chaps.

You didn't mean PORN, you meant SEX!

That's accordin to google labs, porn is for UK, New Zealand and Australia where getting sex isn't a problem while sofisticated porn is difficult to see http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com] - Sex is clearly what Egiptians are looking for http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 [google.com]

Re:No more pr0n

This might be a more useful comparison. This plot of porn and sex, ranked by sex, shows the countries that are most affected.

And yes, Egypt ranks first, followed by India.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn%2C+sex&ctab=0&geo=all&geor=all&date=all&sort=1 [google.com]

Re:These cables were cut on purpose

There's no need to do that with these cables. They have at end somewhere, right? So what the NSA/bad guys do is to tap the ends of the wires. The ISP sometimes helps.

Re:These cables were cut on purpose

That would leave proof, and that would totally ruin the fun of coming up with some elaborate baseless conspiracy theory. What good is a conspiracy theory if there's a way to disprove it that doesn't require a submarine?

Re:These cables were cut on purpose

Are you seriously saying a Chinese mini-sub didn't kidnap an Australian prime minister?

Harold Holt would be turning in his grave.

Wednesday - MI5 complain ; Thursday - cables cut

Wednesday - MI5 issues report complaining they don't have the tools to intercept internet telephony [theregister.co.uk]

Thursday - BOTH Middle-Eastern internet trunk routes that pass near the large British naval base in Cyprus suddenly go dark for a conveniently precise period of one week [theregister.co.uk]

Oh, we're subtle, I'll give you that.

Re:These cables were cut on purpose

If that is how you feel, you should be encrypting sensitive information. There is never a guarantee that someone isn't looking at information you send in the clear over the Internet.

Re:Who is it more important to?

appealed to the public's common sense

Never heard of this what is it? Even so just because the public are using it for entertainment purposes this is no less important than business use. If these people are paying the same amount then they should have equal use. If business are paying more and the contracts (to ISPs) specify selective throttling then I have no problem. But I know that my ISP has no signed contract with me that allows them to put other customer's needs before mine. Make no mistake whether big business or home user they are both customers and should be treated equally.

Re:Who is it more important to?

appealed to the public's common sense

Never heard of this what is it?

Why are Americans so parochial? Just because the public in the US has no common sense doesn't mean it's the the same in the rest of the world.

Re:Who is it more important to?

appealed to the public's common sense

Never heard of this what is it?

Why are Americans so parochial? Just because the public in the US has no common sense doesn't mean it's the the same in the rest of the world.

This "rest of the world" you refer to...

Never heard of this what is it?

Re:Who is it more important to?

But I know that my ISP has no signed contract with me that allows them to put other customer's needs before mine. Make no mistake whether big business or home user they are both customers and should be treated equally.

Good luck with that.

A year ago some cables running south of Taiwan were cut by an earthquake. In Hong Kong the immediate effect was to slow down access. But a few hours later, they had reconfigured it so that domestic users, like myself, working at home, got ZERO connectivity, as they gave almost all the capacity to their business clients. I couldn't even check my email, on Yahoo, for a week. And you know that businesses were just sending the same bloated powerpoint files and videos to each other.

IMHO, they should give a minimum connectivity to everyone so you can use email, the most vital of all services. But when they have their big customers screaming at them about how slow their service is, they'll cheerfully cut off home users completely, knowing most have no alternative.

Re:Same Story

Here's the oft repeated story again, instead of trying to improve infrastructure and services (like backup lines for instance) the consumers are the ones left holding the bag. In fact they're already using the word 'rationing'. Why is it that almost always its the consumers who bear the burden of whatever boo boo's made by the service providers ?

This isn't a private company, it's the entire country's connection to the rest of the world. As in, the government. And there are redundancies, that's why they can still connect. Two of the three main cables (each over a mile apart) failed simultanously.

On the other hand though the statement is worded unsurprisingly inept, i guess the sentiment here might be to take stock of the usage and avoiding unnecessary bandwidth hogging for a while. Though what's unnecessary should be left to the consumers to define for themselves. A simple request for 'help' and 'understanding' would have been more useful without generating all the negative publicity that I'm sure this will generate.

That's pretty much what they did. They said there was limited bandwidth, and asked people not to download music and movies because it would eat up bandwidth that might be needed for contining business purposes.

If you read all his comments, it is quite polite and understanding of individuals' rights. You might not think it was polite because it was translated from Arabic. Egypt is a different country than the United States. Many other countries speak languages besides English.

Re:Next up...

All it's asking is that people try and refrain from heavy downloading (music, movies, etc) for a little while until the lines are fixed. They're not asking people to give up the internet entirely. It would be pretty stupid of them to have a large portion of their economy collapse just so people could torrent.

Re:Ah, good times

Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.

Erm ... there are redundant routes. Two of them, 2km apart, have both been severed the result being that they are down to a single route. Given the political nature of the area it wouldn't be a surprise for the redunancy to not be as high as possible with inter-country connects.

Re:Ah, good times

Not every country can afford the redundancy mate. It's called being poor.

Re:Compromise

Oh come on. How many companies anywhere in the world have a satellite link 'just in case'? Never mind the problem of being able to afford to actually use it.

Most companies will have one DSL connection. Possibly they'll have an ISDN or second DSL available as backup - but that wouldn't help in this case. All that WOULD help would be a satellite link.

The businesses could well be paying more for their Internet link than individuals anyway - we pay about 6 times more for our DSL than a 'home user' account costs. That gives us a lower contention ratio, plus a basic SLA.

Even in the UK, if two of our transatlantic links were severed at the same time, things would slow to a crawl as data gets routed through Germany etc instead. I remember one failing not too long ago and it was very noticeable.

Two out of three failing at the same time is an exceptional event so you can't really expect a developing country to have more than one redundant link available for their two normal ones. How would your region handle the case where **all** their 'normal' Internet links out of the region were severed and they had to fall back to their redundant links???

They're not asking individuals to stop using the Internet at all, just to cut back on all the movie downloads. One movie download is a few hundred thousand emails after all (most of which will be spam..). Also, using the Internet within the country itself would not be a problem