Renesys Blog: Latency Archives

Cyprus Rescues Lebanon

By Doug Madory on July 6, 2012 10:00 AM

It has been a tough week for Internet connectivity in Lebanon. After two national Internet blackouts on the IMEWE cable, Lebanese traffic was moved onto the CADMOS submarine cable to reach international carriers via Cyprus. With this backup in place, and with substantial additional capacity brought online to reduce congestion, just over 70% of the country's networks (prefixes) were brought back online.

In an example of engineering under pressure, Lebanese Telecoms Minister Nicholas Sehnaoui personally flew to Cyprus and met with the Cyprus Telecommunications Authority. The teams (pictured right) then collaborated to find a viable solution.

Continue reading Cyprus Rescues Lebanon.

SMW4 Cut Shakes Up South Asia

By Doug Madory on June 15, 2012 9:59 AM | 3 Comments

Bangladesh could learn a lesson from Pakistan about building a diverse and more survivable connection to the Internet. The two countries had very different experiences as a result of a recent submarine cable cut. Where Pakistan's PTCL and Transworld have spent years building diversity into their International connectivity strategy, in Bangladesh the story is very different.

At 08:41:51 UTC on Wednesday, 6 June 2012, the Sea-Me-We-4 submarine cable suffered a break 60 kilometers from the coast of Singapore, its eastern terminus. While the cause of the failure has not been publicly released, the resulting impact on South Asian Internet transit has been fascinating to follow.

In the past week, it has been widely reported in the news that this incident has served to cripple the Internet for the 158 million people in Bangladesh. However as seen in our Market Intelligence product and our various data sources, the impact of this outage has been much more widespread than publicly reported, as providers in the region scramble to find alternatives. We'll consider some of the resulting changes in this blog.

Continue reading SMW4 Cut Shakes Up South Asia.

Return of SMW3

By Doug Madory on March 23, 2012 10:37 AM | 1 Comment

The new EPEG terrestrial cable through Russia and Iran cannot come fast enough for Oman. Last month, three major submarine cables were severed by a ship's anchor in the shallow waters of the Red Sea, including SEA-ME-WE 3 (SMW3).

Continue reading Return of SMW3.

Satellite Service Sets in Lebanon

By Doug Madory on November 16, 2011 3:16 PM

Early last month, my blog "Pinning Down Latency" included this prediction:

In the coming weeks we expect to see a dramatic shift in transit as Lebanese providers move away from expensive and high-latency satellite service to IMEWE-based service.

Well, it didn't take long for this to play out.

Continue reading Satellite Service Sets in Lebanon.

Pinning Down Latency

By Doug Madory on October 7, 2011 12:35 PM | 2 Comments | 1 TrackBack

Packet latency is a big issue in Internet-based applications (i.e. the stuff in the cloud). In conducting analysis on Internet infrastructure over the years, we have seen many patterns of connectivity. One such pattern that can wreak havoc on latency is "hair-pinning", a phenomenon where traffic takes an unnecessarily long physical path between two points on the Internet due to suboptimal routing. The increased distance results in increased latency, and the "lag" or "sluggishness" that users experience as a result can hinder latency-sensitive online applications whether they are financial trading applications or MS SharePoint.

Continue reading Pinning Down Latency.

Recently in Latency Category

Cyprus Rescues Lebanon

SMW4 Cut Shakes Up South Asia

Return of SMW3

Satellite Service Sets in Lebanon

Pinning Down Latency

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