[kictanet] Central Bank Website down? Which one is next?

[bitange at jambo.co.ke]

FYI.
Ndemo



Technology & Health
Web Disruptions Persist Overseas --- Cables Could Take Weeks to Fix,
Pressuring Business in India, Mideast
By Mariam Fam in Cairo, Chip Cummins in Dubai, Jackie Range in New Delhi,
and Christopher Rhoads in New York
777 words
1 February 2008
The Wall Street Journal
B6
English
(Copyright (c) 2008, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

A large swath of the Middle East and India suffered a second day of
telecommunications woes, partially cut off from the rest of the world
after two undersea Internet cables in the Mediterranean Sea sustained
damage earlier in the week.
Internet-service providers in Egypt and the Persian Gulf reported
widespread Internet delays and disruptions, as well as disrupted
international telephone service. Company executives and government
officials warned repairs could take days or even weeks.
The cable damage also caused widespread disruptions in India, where the
outsourcing industry -- heavily reliant on the Internet -- is a major
contributor to the economy. However, India's biggest technology and
outsourcing companies by revenue, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys
Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., said they hadn't been affected by the
cable problems.
The episode comes amid an explosion in fiber-cable building globally. The
demand for Internet bandwidth has risen steadily in recent years, driven
to a large degree by developing countries coming online, including in
South Asia and the Middle East.
Because of its position between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea,
Egypt has attracted a large share of the new fiber-cable construction,
linking the new projects under way in the region to the European and
Atlantic networks. Having so much fiber concentrated in one place that is
critical to the wider region raises questions of vulnerability.
"If there was ever an example of how Cairo has become a communications hub
to the Middle East, this was it," said Thomas Byrnes, senior vice
president for sales at GPX Global Systems Inc., which opened an Internet
data-center business in Cairo to serve local Internet-service providers
and other clients.
Mr. Byrnes, based in Lothian, Md., said his clients were scrambling to
find other ways to maintain international connectivity in the wake of the
damage to the cables. Having so much fiber in one location isn't that
unusual, he added, as operators want to share infrastructure costs when
the undersea portions hit land.
On Wednesday, officials reported that two cables connecting Europe and the
region were severed off Egypt's coastal city of Alexandria. Egypt's
Ministry of Communications and Information Technology said in a statement
that officials were working to reroute Internet traffic through other
cables and through satellite networks. Officials said the damage to the
cables may have been caused by bad weather, though it is unclear what
happened.
Egyptian officials said initially it could take several days for the
cables to be fixed and for Internet service to return to normal. One
Internet service provider in the United Arab Emirates was more
pessimistic, warning in a statement that it could be weeks before repairs
were completed.
Puneet Tiwari, the director of the ISP Association of India, yesterday
told Dow Jones Newswires that Internet connections there will take about
eight to 10 days to be restored to normalcy. He said he expected affected
Indian Internet-service providers to suffer some revenue losses.
A spokesperson for VSNL, the Indian telecom company involved in a
consortium behind one of the damaged cables, said about a third of the
customers using that cable, called SeaMeWe-4, were automatically
transferred to another cable in the region, so their connectivity was
restored immediately. The remaining customers who hadn't signed up for
that back-up service should have lower performance until the cable is
repaired, according to the spokesperson.
Large-scale disruptions such as this are relatively rare. In December
2006, East Asia suffered weeks of outages after an earthquake damaged
undersea cables near Taiwan.
Internet service was slow yesterday across the oil-rich and booming
Persian Gulf. Disruptions affected business and government offices in
Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
In Dubai, one of seven emirates that make up the UAE, a number of free
zones were hit particularly hard yesterday, including the Dubai
International Financial Centre, an independently regulated complex housing
two financial exchanges and a number of international banks. "It's
terribly slow," said Philipp Lotter, a credit analyst for Moody's Middle
East Ltd., the credit-rating agency.
Trading volumes on some of the regions' exchanges appeared slightly lower
early in the day. It was difficult to determine if that was related to the
Internet disruptions.
UAE Internet-service provider Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co.,
said it was working on a timeline for a system recovery.