Very Crappy internet Afflicts the most of Asia & the Middle East

Original news article here:http://www.crazyengineers.com/threads/slow-internet-connection-you-are-not-alone-fix-will-take-25-days.67426/

Are you experiencing slow Internet connection since last few days? Have you been cursing your Internet service provider for pathetic quality of service? Well, this time, it's not their fault and you are not alone who's getting 1/10th of your regular connection speeds. In fact, the Internet connectivity in entire South East Asia, Middle East and Africa has been affected and the reason is the broken SeaMeWe-4 (South East Asia–Middle East–West Europe 4) along with damage to IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) and EIG (Europe India Gateway) undersea cables that connect most of the region to the Internet servers located in the US & UK. It's being reported that the major cause of disruption of the service is the damage to these cables off the coast of Alexandria, that run from Singapore to France. The maintenance work has already began but is likely to take about 25 days to complete.On 27 March, BBC reported that three divers were arrested from the coast of Alexandria who were trying to cut the undersea Internet cable. Further information is not yet available and it's unclear whether the incident is linked to the cables that got damaged. SEACOM, the African telecom company says that the cause of damage is likely to be something else and they're continuing to investigate the issue.Most of the data and voice communication (~90%) is done through the undersea cables that span several thousand kilometers. The SMW4 cable, for example is 18,800 kilometres in length. The rest of the communication is routed through satellites. India has connected to these undersea cables through a number of ports including Mumbai and Chennai and also has an array of satellites (six apart from INSAT series). This allows the Internet traffic to be routed through other channels and minimise the impact.Indian telecom companies viz. Airtel, Tata Communications, Reliance and BSNL are involved in the maintenance and operations of these undersea cables. Airtel said in a statement that the voice traffic has been normalised and data services are being worked on by routing the data-traffic through alternate routes. Tata Communications, which is the network administrator of the SMW4 and IMEWE cables has confirmed that the SMW4 cable has been cut.The maintenance work is in progress, but likely to take few more days. We hope the issue gets fixed and we get back to our regular Internet connection speeds.

Question:"Why the fuck were those three divers trying to cut teh internetz in the first place? Were they Terminator rejects trying to destroy Skynet? Don't they know the rest of teh world rely on Skynet heavily?" :P

this isn't the first time that cable has been damaged in that location. Unfortunately such things tend to happen quite a bit as ships moored in the vicinity can drag their anchors and end up severing them, and the location means they're extremely difficult and expensive to repair.

@loony:Ouch! Talk about snagging a big one. It's kind of like hooking a piece of garbage instead of snagging a big fish while fishing.I only ever experience slow internet in the past few days while watching videos on youtube. As per browsing the net, nill on the slowness. Downloads, not tested yet though.

Nice underwater internet connection from my country, Malaysia into entire world! :D