Mideast cable cuts tripled Web latency on some routes, Akamai reports

The cable cuts that recently wreaked havoc on Web traffic in the Middle East and Asia caused network latency of more than three times the average on some routes, according to content-delivery network service provider Akamai Technologies.

Akamai monitors Web traffic around the world through a program called SureRoute, which continually scours the Web for the fastest and most reliable path to an origin server. After the first two cables were cut Jan. 30, Akamai's servers recorded several significant latencies on routes between Europe and the Middle East and Asia, where latency doubled and even tripled in some cases. At 10:50 p.m. EST on Jan. 30, Akamai reports, three connections between Europe and India were experiencing latency of twice the average, while a connection between Europe and Egypt was experiencing latency of three times the average.

"For a nine-hour period, we saw a degradation of performance for cities all across India, with response times as high as 15 to 30 seconds," says Willie Tejada, Akamai's vice president for application performance solutions, referring to some of the many major network points of various carriers that Akamai monitors for performance around the world. "Indian users many times didn't have any Internet at all."

Akamai has posted a short video presentation of its findings on its Web site. The presentation shows a global map that displays latent connections between Jan. 29 and Jan. 31. Connections with latency of 1.5 times the average are displayed as yellow lines, while connections where latency exceeded two or three times the average are displayed as orange and red lines, respectively.

Robert Hughes, Akamai's executive vice president for global sales, services and marketing, notes that the cable cuts are not a reflection of poor infrastructure in the Mediterranean, but rather of the overall risk that global communications infrastructure faces. "When a critical part of the Internet's infrastructure is damaged, whole regions of the world can be impacted, as we've seen from this latest example," he says. "It is not that the Internet's infrastructure is inferior in this region. What this event shows is the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet to be disrupted at any time."