Egypt Calls for Bandwidth Rationing 182
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.'"
These cables were cut on purpose (Score:3, Interesting)
Internet the new water food and shelter... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:No more pr0n (Score:5, Interesting)
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]
Next up... (Score:2, Interesting)
Thier concern over how this could impact thier commerce is understandable, but this is not the answer.
Ah, good times (Score:3, Interesting)
When I was in dial-up tech support in the late 90s, we would occasionally get customers who were furious because "my business depends on the internet". Of course we couldn't tell customers what we really thought, so we would all stand outside on break, and be like "your business ha-hah, depends on ha-ha, the INTERNET???". "Well then, you should not have depended on a single provider, if it was really that critical".
It's one thing for some idiot pre-bubble day trader who fancied himself a "business man" to not understand that. In this case, it's a whole region. OK, maybe I'm being a bit harsh. Maybe they're where we were in the 90s. It seems like the whole network would go dark every few weeks or so back then. In the call center they would put up a big sign that said something like "MAE East is down". I haven't seen anything like that for a while. Maybe they'll put in some redundant routes after this, which is probably what happened here.
Re:These cables were cut on purpose (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Who is it more important to? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Same Story (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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:No more pr0n (Score:4, Interesting)
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]
Wednesday - MI5 complain ; Thursday - cables cut (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Who is it more important to? (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Who is it more important to? (Score:2, Interesting)
Middle east is simple : you do what your dad does. If he was a nobel laureate and you failed kindergarten, you head the university. Needless to say, this arrangement has it's problems. Never ask anyone in Egypt why they have a job. They are very open about this you know.
In kuwait the "senior technical designer" of the local telco did not know what a router was. "how do I recognize one ?" - no joke. And I had to explain to the last pakistani that called that just connecting your pc to an -unconnected- router is not going to get you on the internet. Then we got started on bgp. Needless to say, it took a while.
Re:I see it already... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:These cables were cut on purpose (Score:3, Interesting)
A few things:
The NSA could do it, but would likely be detectable. On the other hand, if they cut the cable, then later installed a sniffer at the break while repairing the cable, then the people on each end would ignore the spike in the OTDR plot, because they would say "oh, that's just a break that has been repaired. It's always been there.".