On 1/27/2011 9:36 PM, Craig Labovitz wrote:
And to add to this thread, an graph of Egyptian Internet traffic across a
large number of geographically / topologically diverse providers yesterday (Jan
27):
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5291/5395027368_7d97b74c0b_b.jpg
Traffic drops to a handful of megabits following the withdrawal of most
Egyptian ISP BGP routes.
- Craig
I don't think there is any doubt in anyone's mind on the fact that the
service is being interrupted somehow. The question is why.
Being an old fart, I tend to dig up stories that explain my point.
Almost two years ago, I woke up one morning and got on my trusty
computer to read email, etc. I couldn't reach the Internet. My
microwave to my ISP was up but their uplinks were either down or just
went a few hops and died. I tried to dial in but that just got a fast
busy signal. Calls to the ISP help desks involved via my land line also
got fast busy or "your call could not be completed". Now getting a bit
worried, I dug out my cellphone and had no bars. Usually I got all of
them here.
I immediately thought of 9/11 and was speculating that some terrorist
attack had struck. I quickly went to the family room and powered up the
satellite TV. Everything seemed normal. No attacks.
You probably know the rest. 30 miles away in San Jose, someone went
down a manhole and severed some fiber cables. It turns out that all the
services involved (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Cogent, etc) all were in that
manhole. Almost 200,000 people had no communications for most of the day.
Moral of the story: Separate facts from assumptions and guesses. I did
some Google searches and that region has had large scale disruptions in
the past. Several cables follow the same path to the Suez canal and
were hit.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/2008_submarine_cable_disruption
