Internet services back to normal in Qatar

DOHA: Internet services in Qatar are back to normal as repair work on the damaged undersea cables in the Mediterranean sea has been completed, Qtel said yesterday.

Internet users in Qatar were experiencing a slowdown in the services since December 19, following the breach in three undersea cables - Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We 3 and FLAG - located in the Mediterranean between Sicily and Tunisia.

Several cyber cafes as well as individual Qtel customers contacted by The Peninsula last evening said they experienced normal internet speed and connectivity yesterday.

"We faced problems for some days, but now the services are back to normal." said a resident working with an internet cafe in the Old Airport area.

Sea Me We 4 - which carries a significant volume of data for Qatar - was repaired by France Telecom on December 25, restoring 70 percent of potential capacity to Qatar. However, this cable broke again at a different location the same day, offshore of Alexandria, Egypt, and the repair team had to go there to repair the new breach.

The second cable, FLAG, was fixed on December 31 - restoring 81 percent of capacity to Qatar, while the second breach on Sea Me We 4 was repaired yesterday, restoring 100 percent internet capacity in Qatar.

The third cable, Sea Me We 3, is reportedly going to be repaired today. This cable does not carry any data for Qatar, said a Qtel statement yesterday.

Qtel has been claiming that the company was able to keep the loss of internet capacity in Qatar below 47 percent following the initial breach due to its network of alternative transmission routes and back-up cables. With Qtel's built-in safety margin of 20 percent for its network redundancy (spare capacity), the traffic impact overall was less than 27 percent.

Qtel said it was able to maintain an even split between data sent via westward cables (such as the affected cables in the Mediterranean) and via eastward cables, through Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan. When the cables in the Mediterranean were breached, the company was able to route all data via the eastward cables within six hours of the first problem being reported.