Omar Abdel-Wahab

For the second time in a year, FlagTel cable that connects Egypt with Internet was cut near Italy. After the black January 23rd, December 19 is another offline day in Egypt thanks to the Egyptian government paying no attention to what happened earlier this year. It's not really surprising that the Egyptian government did not learn from past mistakes though another cable could have been built during the past 11 month. After the cable cut, Egyptian Internet users had very low to no connectivity at all. FlagTel routed Egypt traffic via a node in Singapore which was sending most of the traffic through Tokyo, Japan ending up with 26 nodes between any casual Internet subscriber in Egypt and Google for instance. With packet drop of at least 25% in 20 of the 26 nodes, speed of all connections was as low as 2% of their promised speed. Few hours later, traffic was routed via Malaysia, dropping number of nodes between Egypt and Google to 20 nodes with packet loss average of about 25%. Speed of connections reached about 5-10% of their promised speed. The Internet community in Egypt doesn't only include multinational banks and few government organizations but also around 15 million Internet users and few hundreds of IT, IT-related, Software and call centers providers in Egypt. No information yet on the actual loss of the affected companies, organizations and users. With the global financial issues the world is experiencing, Egypt has chosen a very bad time to have an Internet outage.