By Jim Duffy,
LATEST: Egypt lifts Internet blockade
Cisco would not confirm if the employee -- who we decided should remain nameless for his own safety -- worked for the company. But his e-mail domain is "cisco.com" and he told us he was a network consultant for the company over in Egypt.
What follows is his description of events over there as he provided them to Jim Cowie, CTO of Internet monitor company Renesys, and Marshall Eubanks, CEO of provider AmericaFree.TV, in an e-mail at 10:51 EST on Feb. 2:
"Hi Guys,
"I read most of the thread and I'll try to confirm what I can.
"Obviously, we are back online and yes it was decided by the government to take the country offline. They first started blocking twitter and rate limited/blocked facebook but later they just decided, everything must go.
"Two days ago, Google and Twitter came up with a way to help people tweet using land lines. Some international WAN links are functioning and that's because of how the switch was killed. International links go to the same place in either Cairo or Alexandria (Telco Exchange).
"We do have a couple of IXs, but there is just no real interesting local traffic, everyone wants facebook and twitter. Which is all international.
"Everyone just stayed home because of Army imposed Curfew so the internet and business was just on PAUSE and still is.
"Mobile phones were also off for two days but later they were brought back.
"The reason why they decided to do that is because the whole protest was organized on Facebook initially, people agreed to go to Tahrir square (liberation square) downtown together and a lot followed the groups invitation. Later on, people joined despite all the attempts to block the internet and communication.
"Some consider this act as a crime because they cut the tongues of people this way and the government sees it as a step to stop the demonstrations.
"Huge businesses will be affected, one small example is international call centers.
"You will all see clearly that we have bad bad aggregation, if you can analyze this and write a note about it, I'll be able to pass it to the right people when we get life back in order.
"In case things go bad again, we will really need international dial up so if you can help setting this up, it will be appreciated.
"I have to go now to stand in front of my building to protect it (as everyone) because thugs and thieves were let loose on the streets (by the government).
"Regards,"
Even though Cisco officially declined to comment on the Internet crisis in Egypt, that did not stop an employee over there from sharing some war stories with North American network operators in an e-mail.
The e-mail describes the role Facebook played in mobilizing the anti-Mubarak protests and how the government, as a result, systematically shut down access to that and other social media and popular Web sites to try and "cut the tongues of people" motivating the protesters. LATEST: Egypt lifts Internet blockade
Cisco would not confirm if the employee -- who we decided should remain nameless for his own safety -- worked for the company. But his e-mail domain is "cisco.com" and he told us he was a network consultant for the company over in Egypt.
What follows is his description of events over there as he provided them to Jim Cowie, CTO of Internet monitor company Renesys, and Marshall Eubanks, CEO of provider AmericaFree.TV, in an e-mail at 10:51 EST on Feb. 2:
"Hi Guys,
"I read most of the thread and I'll try to confirm what I can.
"Obviously, we are back online and yes it was decided by the government to take the country offline. They first started blocking twitter and rate limited/blocked facebook but later they just decided, everything must go.
"Two days ago, Google and Twitter came up with a way to help people tweet using land lines. Some international WAN links are functioning and that's because of how the switch was killed. International links go to the same place in either Cairo or Alexandria (Telco Exchange).
"We do have a couple of IXs, but there is just no real interesting local traffic, everyone wants facebook and twitter. Which is all international.
"Everyone just stayed home because of Army imposed Curfew so the internet and business was just on PAUSE and still is.
"Mobile phones were also off for two days but later they were brought back.
"The reason why they decided to do that is because the whole protest was organized on Facebook initially, people agreed to go to Tahrir square (liberation square) downtown together and a lot followed the groups invitation. Later on, people joined despite all the attempts to block the internet and communication.
"Some consider this act as a crime because they cut the tongues of people this way and the government sees it as a step to stop the demonstrations.
"Huge businesses will be affected, one small example is international call centers.
"You will all see clearly that we have bad bad aggregation, if you can analyze this and write a note about it, I'll be able to pass it to the right people when we get life back in order.
"In case things go bad again, we will really need international dial up so if you can help setting this up, it will be appreciated.
"I have to go now to stand in front of my building to protect it (as everyone) because thugs and thieves were let loose on the streets (by the government).
"Regards,"
No comments:
Post a Comment