With more and more people going online and social networking becoming pervasive, cyber crime now generates more money than drug trafficking, says global cyber security solutions provider Symantec.
"Cyber crime has surpassed drug trafficking as a criminal money-maker. Every three seconds, an identity is stolen worldwide," Symantec consumer business unit vice-president for Asia-Pacific David Freer told IANS.
Cyber crime is perpetrated by hackers through a spate of attacks in the form of malware, spam, virus and bots when computers are connected to the Internet.
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Top 30 SEO Companies in India
The strategy behind social media optimization is an art. It takes a lot of thought and effort to get a link to the top of search engine results. "Only a company who understands the intricacies of organic optimization will be able to accomplish that," explains topseos.in.
topseos.in has reviewed these companies for quality and customer service. The 30 Best Indian SEO Firms include:
1. SEOValley Solutions
2. PageTraffic
3. Position2, Inc
4. Seo Workz Company
5. Techmagnate
6. Varshyl Tech
7. Communicate2
8. Samyak Online
9. Guide5.com
10. Seo Expert Company India
11. eBrandz Inc
12. Valuepitch interactive
13. Antya Web Private Limited
14. REGALIX Inc.
15. SEO Logistics
16. Performetris
17. Web Net Creatives
18. VTech SEO India
19. Thrifty SEO
20. Niche United IT Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
21. SEOXperts India
22. Cignus Web Services India
23. Cyberframe
24. Glosoft India
25. Palcom Web Pvt. Ltd.
26. SEO Discovery
27. Empowered SEO
28. Webgainmedia
29. BrainPulse SEO Sercives
30. E2 Solutions
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Video Road Hogs Stir Fear of Internet Traffic Jam
Caution: Heavy Internet traffic ahead. Delays possible.
For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”
But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting a lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say, would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.
“The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year.
Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.
That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets smarter.
“The 50 percent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.
The question of the problem’s severity is more than a technical one, since it will affect the shape and cost of the nation’s policy on broadband infrastructure, a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.
While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.
“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”
The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.
That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.
“When I mention my own service, people here shake their heads in disbelief,” said Mr. Baker, who is a board member of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that helps guide Internet standards and policy.
In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.
“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.
In the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, there was a glut of capacity — so-called dark fiber, strung around the world and then left dormant. Now demand is catching up with that supply. In its prediction of more than 100 percent annual growth, Nemertes, a telecommunications research firm, assumes brisk use of new innovations like high-end videoconferencing, known as telepresence, which corporations are beginning to embrace as an alternative to costly, time-consuming travel.
If this technology becomes a consumer product in the next few years, as some analysts predict, Internet traffic could spike even more sharply.
Slick video chats are something that William Bentley, a 13-year-old New Yorker, would like to see. He is fairly representative of the next generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament, and downloads music and videos.
Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, “It would be nice to have everybody always right there — just click and you could see them clearly and talk to them.”
That sort of service is certainly going to require more bandwidth and more investment, with higher costs across the spectrum of the Internet ecosystem that includes cable and telecommunications carriers, Internet companies, media Web sites and even consumers. AT&T, for one, said last week that it would spend $1 billion this year — double its 2006 expenditures — to expand its overseas infrastructure.
But even if investment lags behind, there will be no Internet blackout. Indeed, the Internet has survived predictions of collapse in the past, most notably by Robert M. Metcalfe, a networking pioneer and entrepreneur, who in a 1995 magazine column warned of a “catastrophic collapse” of the Internet in 1996. There were service problems, but nothing like Mr. Metcalfe predicted, and on stage at a conference in 1997 he ate his words.
“The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr. Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.”
For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.
Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”
But the Internet traffic surge represents more a looming challenge than an impending catastrophe. Even those most concerned are not predicting a lights-out Internet crash. An individual user, they say, would experience Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.
“The Internet doesn’t collapse, but there would be a growing class of stuff you just can’t do online,” said Johna Till Johnson, president of Nemertes Research, which predicted the bandwidth squeeze by 2011, anticipating that demand will grow by 100 percent or more a year.
Others are less worried — at least in the short term. Andrew M. Odlyzko, a professor at the University of Minnesota, estimates that digital traffic on the global network is growing about 50 percent a year, in line with a recent analysis by Cisco Systems, the big network equipment maker.
That sounds like a daunting rate of growth. Yet the technology for handling Internet traffic is advancing at an impressive pace as well. The router computers for relaying data get faster, fiber optic transmission gets better and software for juggling data packets gets smarter.
“The 50 percent growth is high. It’s huge, but it basically corresponds to the improvements that technology is giving us,” said Professor Odlyzko, a former AT&T Labs researcher. Demand is not likely to overwhelm the Internet, he said.
The question of the problem’s severity is more than a technical one, since it will affect the shape and cost of the nation’s policy on broadband infrastructure, a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.
While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.
“The long-term issue is where innovation happens,” Professor Odlyzko said. “Where will the next Google, YouTube, eBay or Amazon come from?”
The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.
That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.
“When I mention my own service, people here shake their heads in disbelief,” said Mr. Baker, who is a board member of the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that helps guide Internet standards and policy.
In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.
“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.
In the aftermath of the bursting of the technology bubble in 2000, there was a glut of capacity — so-called dark fiber, strung around the world and then left dormant. Now demand is catching up with that supply. In its prediction of more than 100 percent annual growth, Nemertes, a telecommunications research firm, assumes brisk use of new innovations like high-end videoconferencing, known as telepresence, which corporations are beginning to embrace as an alternative to costly, time-consuming travel.
If this technology becomes a consumer product in the next few years, as some analysts predict, Internet traffic could spike even more sharply.
Slick video chats are something that William Bentley, a 13-year-old New Yorker, would like to see. He is fairly representative of the next generation of digital consumer: He has made and posted his own YouTube videos, subscribes to YouTube channels, enjoys multiplayer games like World of Warcraft and Unreal Tournament, and downloads music and videos.
Asked what he would want next from the Internet, he replied, “It would be nice to have everybody always right there — just click and you could see them clearly and talk to them.”
That sort of service is certainly going to require more bandwidth and more investment, with higher costs across the spectrum of the Internet ecosystem that includes cable and telecommunications carriers, Internet companies, media Web sites and even consumers. AT&T, for one, said last week that it would spend $1 billion this year — double its 2006 expenditures — to expand its overseas infrastructure.
But even if investment lags behind, there will be no Internet blackout. Indeed, the Internet has survived predictions of collapse in the past, most notably by Robert M. Metcalfe, a networking pioneer and entrepreneur, who in a 1995 magazine column warned of a “catastrophic collapse” of the Internet in 1996. There were service problems, but nothing like Mr. Metcalfe predicted, and on stage at a conference in 1997 he ate his words.
“The Internet has proven to be wonderfully resilient,” said Mr. Metcalfe, who is now a venture capitalist. “But the Internet is vulnerable today. It’s not that it will collapse, but that opportunities will be lost.”
Friday, February 15, 2008
Internet marketers, test before you leap
Research continues to be something marketers do – and agencies recommend – only if “affordable”. During the last great boom in print advertising, this tendency to be penny wise was much strengthened as more people outside Madison Avenue came to know about how much one of the gods, William Bernbach (godfather of many immortal campaigns, including Volkswagen and Avis Rent-a-Car), abhorred the wholesale worship of audience research.
No doubt that inspired campaign for Avis (“We’re No. 2…We try harder”) would never have seen the light of day had he not rejected the pre-test findings that readers would find the tack defeatist. But the intuitions of genius cannot justify the prejudices of mere mortals.
Much of this penny-pinching in India is defended on the ground that India is not like the US. (Part of this attitude derives from misplaced pride that we know better than these crazy big-spending Americans, though their economy is the strongest in the world. The other part has to do with rationalising failures, especially when the desi members of the marketing team have failed to implement an international campaign that they themselves had hailed before. But then, we are like that only.) Even visiting overseas honchos fall for these lines of patter.
Ad agency creatives – especially the stars of branding – ape Bernbach because so much of their output sells no one but their clients and, maybe, the local Ad Awards judges. Testing would only expose their creative mortality. And hardboiled marketers know that apart from the critical element of name registration that comes from well targeted marketing communications, the name of the game is still sound pricing and distribution.
The fact remains that what doesn’t work is an avoidable waste. We are not saving money if our advertising has less than the impact required for effective marketing. And not even Sir Martin knows what works and what doesn’t unless it is tested. If excuses can be made for not pre-testing the message in traditional media, there can be none whatsoever on the Internet. Online media are so trackable and multiple executions of content can be delivered at so little incremental expense – no printing, no materials, no MR agency, no gophers, even tabulation is automatic, bar the printouts. The only expense really is on web analytics. No doubt, audience demographics are harder to gauge, but the impact of messaging – the bottomline for marketing communication – is not.
The reward for incorporating analytics is huge. As a recent article in Silverpop confirms, “… crafting these highly-relevant email messages can generate nine times more improvement in revenue and as much as 32 times more improvement in net profit over undifferentiated broadcast campaigns. Even after including additional Web analytics spending, the use of Website clickstream data as a targeting attribute still significantly improves both topline and bottom-line results.”
In other words, besides the cost-related economies, the returns too are juicy. Our online marketing will, one hopes, some day graduate from the waste of over-dependence on massive overkill (and boredom for readers, untold irritation for recipients of junk mail and spam and mind-numbing TVCs) to the economies of targeted messaging. We need to re-learn the truths of direct marketing as they are applicable to the Internet. Let us not have to re-invent the wheel.
© exchange4media
No doubt that inspired campaign for Avis (“We’re No. 2…We try harder”) would never have seen the light of day had he not rejected the pre-test findings that readers would find the tack defeatist. But the intuitions of genius cannot justify the prejudices of mere mortals.
Much of this penny-pinching in India is defended on the ground that India is not like the US. (Part of this attitude derives from misplaced pride that we know better than these crazy big-spending Americans, though their economy is the strongest in the world. The other part has to do with rationalising failures, especially when the desi members of the marketing team have failed to implement an international campaign that they themselves had hailed before. But then, we are like that only.) Even visiting overseas honchos fall for these lines of patter.
Ad agency creatives – especially the stars of branding – ape Bernbach because so much of their output sells no one but their clients and, maybe, the local Ad Awards judges. Testing would only expose their creative mortality. And hardboiled marketers know that apart from the critical element of name registration that comes from well targeted marketing communications, the name of the game is still sound pricing and distribution.
The fact remains that what doesn’t work is an avoidable waste. We are not saving money if our advertising has less than the impact required for effective marketing. And not even Sir Martin knows what works and what doesn’t unless it is tested. If excuses can be made for not pre-testing the message in traditional media, there can be none whatsoever on the Internet. Online media are so trackable and multiple executions of content can be delivered at so little incremental expense – no printing, no materials, no MR agency, no gophers, even tabulation is automatic, bar the printouts. The only expense really is on web analytics. No doubt, audience demographics are harder to gauge, but the impact of messaging – the bottomline for marketing communication – is not.
The reward for incorporating analytics is huge. As a recent article in Silverpop confirms, “… crafting these highly-relevant email messages can generate nine times more improvement in revenue and as much as 32 times more improvement in net profit over undifferentiated broadcast campaigns. Even after including additional Web analytics spending, the use of Website clickstream data as a targeting attribute still significantly improves both topline and bottom-line results.”
In other words, besides the cost-related economies, the returns too are juicy. Our online marketing will, one hopes, some day graduate from the waste of over-dependence on massive overkill (and boredom for readers, untold irritation for recipients of junk mail and spam and mind-numbing TVCs) to the economies of targeted messaging. We need to re-learn the truths of direct marketing as they are applicable to the Internet. Let us not have to re-invent the wheel.
© exchange4media
Friday, February 1, 2008
Cable Break Causes Wide Internet Outage
At least for a while, the World Wide Web wasn't so worldwide.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security software maker based in California. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the scope was wide: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labor for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by Friday, the state news agency reported.
The snapped cables -- which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb -- caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.
There was concern for millions of South Asians who send money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards -- but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi's UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.
The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company's 53 branches to send money home.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.
Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well -- but smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.
"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If something happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry will suffer."
Many larger U.S. companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were intact.
Citigroup Inc. spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company's customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."
Intel Corp. said its Indian operation, which employs about 3,000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.
"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel's South Asia business operations.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.
Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism -- but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Credits:AP
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped, disrupting service Thursday across a swath of Asia and the Middle East.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
"There's definitely been a slowdown," said Anurag Kuthiala, a system engineer at the New Delhi office of Symantec Corp., a security software maker based in California. "We're able to work, but the system is very slow."
While the cause of the damage was not yet known, the scope was wide: Traffic slowed on the Dubai stock exchange, and there was concern that workers who labor for the well-off in the Mideast might not be able to send money home to poor relatives.
Although disruptions to larger U.S. firms were not widespread, the outage raised questions about the vulnerability of the infrastructure of the Internet. One analyst called it a "wake-up call," and another cautioned that no one was immune.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, were snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
There was speculation a ship's anchor might be to blame. The two cables, named FLAG Europe Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4, are in close proximity.
Egyptian officials said initial attempts to reach the cables were stymied by poor weather. Repairs could take a week once workers arrive at the site, and engineers were scrambling to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables.
The Egyptian minister of communications and information technology said Internet service in that country had been restored to about 45 percent and would be up to 80 percent by Friday, the state news agency reported.
The snapped cables -- which lie on the sea floor and at some points are no thicker than the average human thumb -- caused problems across an area thousands of miles wide. Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Bahrain all reported trouble.
But in India, which earns billions of dollars a year from outsourcing, the loss of Internet access was potentially disastrous. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India said the country had lost half its capacity.
TeleGeography, a U.S. research group that tracks submarine cables, said the disruption cut capacity by 75 percent on the route from the Mideast to Europe.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unheard of. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
In the Mideast, outages caused a slowdown in traffic on Dubai's stock exchange late Wednesday. The exchange was back up by Thursday, but many Middle Eastern businesses were still experiencing difficulties.
There was concern for millions of South Asians who send money home. They do everything from construction to child care for the wealthy and are paid little by local standards -- but their income is often a lifeline for poorer families back in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
"The system is a bit slow today, but we have not experienced a total breakdown," said Sudhir Kumar Shetty, who runs Abu Dhabi's UAE Exchange, a money transfer firm.
The major test will come Friday, the first day of the month, when thousands of foreign workers are expected to descend on the company's 53 branches to send money home.
With two of the three cables that pass through the Suez Canal cut, Internet traffic from the Middle East and India intended for Europe was forced to reroute eastward, around most of the globe.
In India, the Internet was sluggish, with some users unable to connect at all and others left frustrated by spotty service.
Analysts said India had built up massive amounts of bandwidth in recent years and would likely recover without major economic losses. Larger companies with sophisticated backups appeared equipped to weather the outages well -- but smaller firms said they could lose business if full Internet access was not quickly restored.
"Telecom and bandwidth are the bedrocks of the IT (information-technology) industry," said Ajit Ranade, the chief economist at the Aditya Birla Group, an international manufacturing and services company. "If something happens to the bedrock, obviously the IT industry will suffer."
Many larger U.S. companies said the effect was minimal, partly because the data routes that head east from Asia, under the Pacific Ocean, were intact.
Citigroup Inc. spokesman Samuel Wang said some of his company's customer-service system was affected, but only minimally. He said the bank relied on backup systems and was "back to business as usual."
Intel Corp. said its Indian operation, which employs about 3,000 people and is focused on research and development, has a system with many safeguards built in.
"When one of the nodes goes down, the network is able to reroute itself," said Rahul Bedi, who heads Intel's South Asia business operations.
Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center, said the outage should be a "wake-up call" about the need to better protect vital infrastructure.
"This shows how easy it would be to attack" vital networks, such as the Internet, mobile phones and electronic banking and government services.
Wednesday's damage wasn't terrorism -- but it could have been, he said, adding that "when it comes to great technology, it's not about building it, it's how to protect it."
Credits:AP
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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