Friday, February 01, 2008

Internet in Egypt

A couple of days ago, Egypt was struck by a non-natural catastrophe. For anyone who uses the internet at home, or work, has felt either the internet outage, or the exceedingly slow connections. Turned out that a fiber-optic marine cable has been severed, or damaged. Those who didn't know, found out that Egypt is connected to the world through two cables.

Also, for those who didn't know, that the damaged marine cable provides several other countries with internet services, and that includes India, and several gulf countries.

Using modern techniques, they have figured out that the damaged part is 10 km away from the coast of Alexandria, and 10 km off the coast is in Egypt's territory. They have attempted to figure out what damaged the cable, but they couldn't till now.

Several jokes have surfaced, like the whale that bit into the cable, among others, and there are several other jokes that did not see the surface, like they were extending sewer pipes which crossed the cable, so they had to cut it.

In any case, I think it was a bad idea to have a cable that important go through Egypt, or any other country. Even better if there were 2 or 3 other cables that feed the area.

Now Egypt stays in the dark for 10 more days.

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