In a major blow to communication reliability, internet access was disrupted across much of Egypt and India, along with several other Gulf Arab countries. No news agencies are reporting the incident as anything more than an accident at the moment. An international undersea cable was severed, causing the outage.

In outlying areas, such as the Gulf Arab countries and parts of India, the main affect of the network being cut has been bandwidth slow down. Major telecommunications carriers in the areas have been transferring their bandwidth to help cover the area and keep it connected, but in the parts of Egypt and India where the connection has been completely lost it may not be up again until Wednesday. The repairs slated for Wednesday will only restore a partial level of service intended to get business and banks up and running again.

The major effect of the outage is feared to be financial. Banks and other financial institutions can not fully complete many of their services without access to online monetary transfers and other functions. This could have a trickle down effect to the general public a they find payments not being made or received on previously set up transactions and other monetary problems while the connection is down.

Indian Internet Service Providers’ Association President Rajesh Chharia told the Headlines Today news channel that a “degraded” service would be up and running by Wednesday night, but full restoration would take 10 to 15 days.

“The big operators have transferred their small broadband connectivity through the Pacific route, and that’s the reason there’s no hue and cry in the country,” he said.

Some officials in Egypt and India are blaming the weather, as there have been record storms causing problems there for a few days along the Suez canal. Some internet pundits are speculating that this is one way climate change will affect the world economy. How Egypt and India prepare for this to happen in future should be of paramount interest to other countries, and all countries should be preparing for storms and natural events to effect their communications and economies as well.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, January 30th, 2008 at 12:46 pm under Internet.  Print This Post

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