Slow Internet? 3 divers in Egypt caught cutting Internet cables to blame!

This isn’t a good week for Internet addicts. After  the Spam attacks , it now seems undersea Internet cables were cut in Egypt which has definitely affected Internet speed in India. Egypt’s naval forces captured three scuba divers who were trying to cut an undersea Internet cable in the Mediterranean on Wednesday, a military spokesman said. Telecommunications executives meanwhile blamed a weeklong Internet slowdown on damage caused to another cable by a ship. [caption id=“attachment_678879” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Reuters[/caption] Col Ahmed Mohammed Ali said in a statement on his official Facebook page that divers were arrested while “cutting the undersea cable” of the country’s main communications company, Telecom Egypt. The statement said they were caught on a speeding fishing boat just off the port city of Alexandria. A LiveMint report today quoted Bharti Airtel, Tata Telecommunications officials confirming that the cable cut had affected the speed of Internet in India. According to the report, the three submarine cables that have been affected go by the acronyms SMW4, IMEWE and EIG. The SMW4 or the South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe 4 cable is approximately 18,800 kilometres long, and provides the primary Internet backbone between South East Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe. For full details click here. I-ME-WE stands for India-Middle East-Western Europe and is 13,000-kilometre submarine communications cable system between India and France. The cable system includes a terrestrial link connecting the cities of Alexandria and Suez in Egypt. More details here. Ali’s statement was accompanied by a photo showing three young men, apparently Egyptian, staring up at the camera in what looks like an inflatable launch. It did not further have details on who they were or why they would have wanted to cut a cable. Egypt’s Internet services have been disrupted since 22 March. Telecom Egypt executive manager Mohammed el-Nawawi told the private TV network CBC that the damage was caused by a ship, and there would be a full recovery on Thursday. There was preliminary evidence of slow Internet connections as far away as Pakistan and India, said Jim Cowie, chief technology officer and co-founder of Renesys, a network security firm based in Manchester, NH, that studies Internet traffic. A cable cut can cause data to become congested and flow the long way around the world, he said. It’s not the first time cable cuts have affected the Mideast in recent years. Errant ships’ anchors are often blamed. Serious undersea cable cuts caused widespread Internet outages and disruptions across the Middle East on two separate occasions in 2008. With inputs from Associated Press