The last quarter of 2008 saw some disruption in Internet services, thanks to the breakdown of undersea cables, with even Gmail affected by a minor outage
How would you describe a day without the Internet? A day without e-mails? Unthinkable, isn’t it? While the Internet has made life easier for us,
on the flip side it has made us dependent on the medium so much so that even a slight disruption makes us feel crippled. As an entrepreneur, one ought to keep tabs on the latest trends and updates in the Internet space.
Three major happenings in the Internet space concerning India made the news during the quarter under review: three undersea cables severed, causing disruption in service; public sector telecom giant MTNL launched India’s first multi-play service and high-definition television on fiber-to-the-home service; and the outage of Gmail, one of the world’s most popular mailing platform.
Network outage
The first major incident was on December 19, 2008, when three major undersea cables—SEA-ME-WE 4, SEA-ME-WE 3, and FLAG—located in the Mediterranean were severed causing significant disruption in Internet services across Europe and Asia. This incident, which was similar to another such disruption in January 2008, resulted in more than 1,400 of Egypt’s and more than 450 of India’s globally routed prefixes (networks) suffering outages, according to measurements from Renesys, a firm that provides global Internet monitoring and analysis solutions. Repair work began only two days later, when France Telecom, one of the largest telecommunications company in the world, dispatched the repair ship, Raymond Croz to the site. The Akamai report states, “Unfortunately, as France Telecom finished repairing the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable on December 25, the cable broke again in a different place, which pushed out repairs until approximately 10 days later than originally expected.”
| Quick Points |
| 1) Attack traffic: During the fourth quarter of 2008, attack traffic originated from 193 unique countries, up by 8% from the third quarter count of 179 countries. The US was ranked number one for the first time in 2008, after being placed second to either China or Japan throughout the year. The US, China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan were consistently among the top 10 countries generating attack traffic through the year. |
| 2) Fastest countries: Approximately 19% of Internet connections around the world were at speeds greater than 5 Mbps, representing a 21% increase over the average global connection speed at the end of 2007. With an average connection speed of 15 Mbps, South Korea held the first position. |
| 3) Slowest countries: The Akamai report states that, “Similar to the prior three quarters, many of the countries with the largest percentages of connections to Akamai at speeds below 256 Kbps were either island nations or on the African continent.” |
| 4) Undersea cables: According to telecommunications research firm Telegeography (as mentioned in the report), the rapid growth in Internet capacity around the world over the last decade has led to a diminished role for the US as an Internet hub. In 1999, 91% of data from Asia passed through the US at some point, but by 2008 that had fallen to just 54%. One major reason for this being “inter-regional connectivity made possible by numerous submarine cable projects.” |
| 5) Wireless connectivity: There were three major events in this space. In November 2008 NASA reported successfully tested its Deep Space Network, modeled after the Earth-bound Internet. |
However, this was not the only case of network outage in the last quarter. Earlier, on December 4, equipment failure had hampered connectivity in Haiti, which resulted in outage that lasted for approximately three-and-a-half hours. On December 8, Time Warner’s DNS servers failed, resulting in an Internet impairment for approximately two-and-a-half hours.
Fiber to home connection
The quarter saw the launch of public sector telecom firm MTNL’s multi-play service and high-definition television on its fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) platform on November 11, 2008. This was in association with Aksh Optifibre, a manufacturer and exporter of optical fiber cables. While hailing its service, MTNL said that “replacing the traditional copper wire from the exchange to the home (also called the last
mile connectivity), would allow customers of MTNL to experience world class tele-viewing and Internet browsing experience from the comfort of their homes.”
It is notable that though the FTTH segment is being explored by many operators, most of them have sidelined their plans in favor of direct-to-home service. Indian firms were not the only one to introduce FTTH services, as announcements were also made by Brasil Telecom (Brazil), Telefonica (Spain), Telecom Italia (Italy), and TTK (Russia).
| India stands at: | |
| Rank | For |
| 20 | For number of unique IP addresses, with 2.63 million IPs |
| 115 | In terms of average connection speed, with 772 Kbps average connection speed |
| 17 | In terms of attack traffic, with 1.16% of observed attack traffic |
| 62 | For high broadband adoption, with 0.56% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 5 Mbps |
| 81 | For high broadband penetration, with fewer than 0.0001 high broadband IPs per capita in Q4 2008 |
| 93 | For broadband adoption, with 3.74% of connections to Akamai at speeds over 2 Mbps |
| 118 | For broadband penetration, with 0.0001broadband IPs per capita in Q4 2008 |
| 55 | For narrowband adoption, with 25.8% of connections to Akamai at speeds below 256 Kbps |
Gmail outage
On February 24th of this year, many Gmail users could not access their mail accounts as the site had a major outage lasting over two and a half hours. Gmail was quick to apologize. “Lots of people around the world who rely on Gmail were disrupted during their waking and working hours, and we’re very sorry.” The reason for the outage was described as a “routine maintenance” at one of the European data centers. The apology said that this generally does not cause any disruption as then the routing is done through another data center. However, due to some new code (that keeps data geographically closer to the user) another data center in Europe was overloading. However, this was not the first instance of Gmail outage in the last year; it has reportedly suffered from at least five such outages in the past year.
Interesting trends: India vs others
India grabbed the 20th spot globally for the number of unique IP addresses existing, with 2.63 million IPs. The number grew at 42.91% year-over-year, and 1.69% from the third quarter of 2008. The US ranked number one, with 114.1 million unique IPs.
India, with an average connection speed of 772 Kbps, was at 115th position among the 223 countries measured in terms of average connection speeds. The global average was reported to be 1.5 Mbps. South Korea, which was world number one, had an average speed of 15 Mbps.
India was ranked 17th globally in terms of attack traffic, with 1.16% of observed attack traffic, while the US held the first position with 22.85%. During the last quarter of 2008 Akamai observed attack traffic originating from 193 countries.
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