#renesys

Syria has confronted with a massive internet issue in the last days: all online users couldn’t access any online page in the country’s borders, as reported by Renesys, a company dealing with internet connection monitoring all around the globe. In a blog post, the internet monitoring company stated: “Syrian Internet down again since 07:01 UTC (10:00 Damascus time), Wednesday, 15 [...]

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In February 2011, the laying of an undersea Internet cable between Venezuela and Cuba was completed.

In January 2013, the first signs of life in the cable were reported.

When fully operational, the cable will provide download speeds 3,000 times faster than Cuba's current Internet and be capable of handling millions of phone calls simultaneously,

What's interesting about this article is the means by which this news surfaced.

The quote above comes from a Reuters story. The story was based off a blog post from Renesys, an Internet monitoring agency, who had been monitoring Internet activity from Cuba.

Renesys describes what they detected:

On January 14th, we began to see routed paths for data flowing inbound to Cuba through a new service provider, Telefonica. At the same time, we saw a second "mode" of latency for Internet traffic emerge, with reduced delays in the 400ms range. That's fast enough that at least half the path must be terrestrial; we inferred that we were seeing signs of the activation of ALBA-1 from Venezuela.

However, "people on the ground in Havana reported no changes in Internet performance."

But yesterday everything changed, as the data began to reflect: 

a pure terrestrial solution, based on subsea and overland cables — the traditional Internet that nearly everyone else on earth enjoys. 

Reuters also reports its own offices noticed a change:

On Tuesday the speed of Reuters' Internet transmissions at its Havana office significantly increased as ETECSA apparently began linking customers to the cable.

It's still inferential just exactly what happened, but it's a fun story because it walks through how a closed society like Cuba begins to open up through cable optic fiber.

And, then, how that story surfaces online (NOTE: I may have found this article via the Drudge Report).

We may be a ways away from a Cuba with 100% Internet penetration, but we can watch it happen over time via Renesys' website.

It would be even more fun to watch Cuba light up with Internet connections in real time.

As the conflict in Syria continues unabated, we have observed an increase in the number of significant Internet outages in this war-torn country in the past six weeks. We first commented on the situation last year and again last month.

Monday April 11th arrived with confirmation of one of the longest running rumors of the telecom mill. Level3 has agreed to acquire its competitor Global Crossing in a tax-free stock swap valued at $3 billion. Deal terms specify that Global Crossing shareholders receive 16 shares of Level3 for every common or preferred stock held at closing. Speculation of just such an event has been circling the telecom campfire for years now so this week’s news came as little surprise.

Should regulators give the deal a thumbs-up the combined entity will represent a dominant force amongst Tier 1 networks. As previously discussed in this blog, Renesys shows Level3 to be the largest global network as measured by the sheer amount of IP space transited on their network. Based on this same ranking schema Global Crossing is the third largest network behind Sprint. Put the two together and you’ve got a massive operation with significant reach in terms of geography, route miles and access.

Based on this information executives on either side of the deal were quick to point out the economic efficiencies to be gained by merging networks. Consolidated operations will definitely help to reduce costs in terms of sharing network access and settlement free peering arrangements as well as eliminating overlapping support personnel and systems. There is however another and less favorable side to consolidation in our opinion.

Level3 has already struggled to integrate the 31 companies it has acquired since 1992. This list includes some rather sizeable operations such as Genuity, Williams and Broadwing. Silent Partner has experienced firsthand the difficulties of managing such a huge, disparate asset base. Capacity requests show no availability only to change 24 hours later. At other times buildings with legacy Williams or Broadwing fiber demarked come back as “off-net” according to L3. This confusion leads long provisioning intervals, messy support during outages and a general sense of frustration from the customer perspective. Integrating a network as large and far-reaching as Global Crossing’s will clearly present problems for the new entity.

While most analysts were quick to discuss the network implications of Level3 gobbling up Global Crossing, Silent Partner is curious to see what effect if any there will be upon the datacenter industry. Last summer Level3 conducted a detailed strategic assessment of its colocation business that led many to believe they were considering selling this unit. Traditionally L3 datacenters suffered from low power density since most were built in the telco colo style of the late-90s. L3 often uses these sites to house their own equipment therefore selling off excess capacity was essentially gravy on top of their core business. Obviously getting customers to colocate within a L3 datacenter guarantees control over their network spend onsite. By November of 2010 however Level3 had committed to upgrading 10 facilities in the US in order to deliver better power density. Thereafter a renewed push was made to sell colocation through direct and indirect channels. 

... A minority of our peers report some surviving paths through the peering connection between Level3 and Telecom Italia, but traceroutes into those prefixes fail, suggesting that the Libyan cutoff is complete.

wow, egypt is so desperate to stifle dissent that they are cutting off their own businesses. This officially puts the country in unrest.