In the past week a number of submarine cables suffered major outages, severely disrupting internet connectivity between the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Europe. Renesys, a provider of information on worldwide internet operations, reported in its blog that EASSy, SEACOM and Sea-Me-We-4 (SMW4) submarine cables suffered disruptions. EASSy and SEACOM outages temporarily wiped out internet connectivity in parts of East Africa, from Djibouti to South Africa. Sea-We-Me-4, the primary internet backbone between Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East and Europe, failed on 27 March 2013 at 6:20 UTC, leading to a widespread disruption of internet services from Egypt all the way to Pakistan.
“When submarine cables are cut, it's critically important to have access to backup paths with sufficient capacity to carry traffic to affected destinations”, explains Jim Cowie, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Renesys. “Carrier-neutral data centres and internet exchange points play an important role here. Maintaining a presence at an IX maximizes your options for re-establishing high-performance route diversity during a submarine cable outage event.”
Since October 2012, the UAE-IX internet exchange in Dubai has been operating as an internet hub between Europe, Africa and Asia. Almost 20 international and regional ISPs exchange traffic here. “Higher connectivity can reduce the impact of submarine cable cuts for ISPs and their customers in the Middle East, East Africa and South Asia”, says Harald Summa, CEO of DE-CIX Management GmbH, which manages UAE-IX. “When they interconnect at the UAE-IX, a more robust internet infrastructure for the entire region emerges. This type of increased resilience is to the benefit of all providers and internet users.”
Full press release: http://go.de-cix.net/uae-ix_seacable
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