ALKHOBAR, 26 November 2004 — Across the Kingdom, problems with the Saudi Internet continued for the third day. Late last night Saudi Telecom finally announced that they had been struggling since Tuesday at 5 p.m. to repair damaged connections to undersea communications cables.
The general manager of STC’s network operations, Sameer Asaad Matbuli said that a construction company in Jeddah cut the cables while digging the foundation for a shopping center. Damaged were the FLAG and SE-ME-WE2 undersea cables that connect the communications networks in the Kingdom with international carriers.
Initially there were problems with international telephone calls into and out of the Kingdom. STC has been able to resolve that issue by switching to a back-up plan involving redundancy through the use of satellites at King Fahd Space City in Jeddah and the Dirab Earth Station in Riyadh. Calls are also being routed over a third undersea cable, SE-ME-WE3.
The situation concerning the Internet is still a problem. The international circuit serving King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) has been affected. Reports from the Internet Services Unit at KACST are that only three STM1 cables are functional.
STC has been struggling to overcome the disparity between the demand for connectivity and available connectivity by laying down new cables.
Matbuli said that all STC’s specialist crews were working on this problem, laying cables in very difficult conditions through water filled conduits. Internet connectivity at peak times is still a problem and Matbuli remarked that work will continue until the situation is stabilized. Although Matbuli apologized for the difficulties faced by STC’s customers, he pointed out that the current situation was caused by actions beyond STC’s control.
Matbuli emphasized that this entire crisis could have been averted if the contractor had simply called 906 to check the location of underground cables in the area before digging. He stated that the fines for cutting into fiber optic cables will probably be greatly increased due to this incident. STC is being forced to shell out millions of riyals to maintain international connectivity in this emergency.
STC is hoping to be able to bring Internet bandwidth up to normal levels by this afternoon, although no promises have been made. The Kingdom’s Internet is currently running at 450 Mbps. How does this translate into service conditions? Currently, individuals and companies running DSL connections of 256 Kbps can download at speeds of only 80-90 Kbps. Dial-up users are able to send e-mail but browsing is at a crawl. If the situation is not resolved by Saturday morning, companies could encounter serious inconvenience in utilizing all e-business services.
