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Can One Anchor Drop Cripple Global Internet Traffic?
Written by Evan Schuman
February 3, 2008
When an undersea cable was cut, near the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, it was the third such cut in recent days and it raised the question of the robustness of global Internet traffic.
The traffic watchers at Keynote Systems this weekend saw the problems throughout the region, a key area for supply chain partners of global retailers.
"Keynote Systems continues to see poor performance and availability for users in India as they tried to access Web sites hosted in Europe and the US. In light of a 3rd cable cut near Dubai, it seems that users in the region will have to continue to expect 50-100 percent increases in load times for Web sites hosted abroad," a Keynote statement reported.
"Keynote customers that host their Internet presence in the Middle East and India are also seeing significant performance degradation as users around the globe attemp to access their Web site. Traffic inbound to the region from Asia, Europe, and the US is being affected. On average Web sites in the region have slowed down by a factor of four compared to their normal speed due to constraints in the remaining available bandwidth," the firm said. |
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Evan Schuman is the former retail technology editor for eWEEK.com, PCMagazine, CIOInsight and retail reporter for RISNews and Consumer Goods Technology. Having covered IT issues for 21 years - and other stuff like legal affairs, politics, Wall Street and the environment for about eight years before that - Schuman is in a good position to gripe about technology trends and sometimes accidentally make a good point.
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It's late on a Friday night and as Jane Smith walks into her local grocery frozen food aisle, she notices a neighbor walking away carrying a frozen pizza, right near a digital advertisement for 20 percent off of a Budweiser six-pack. Jane reaches into the freezer to grab her favorite Häagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream but notices that the digital ad instantly changes to hawk 40 percent off fresh apple pie in the bakery section.
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