The update on the whole undersea cable thing and no Internet in Sri Lanka is pretty interesting. I’ll be working it into a novel somewhere along the lines, but that doesn’t mean that one of you couldn’t also. Feel free! (yeah, like you really need my permission or something . . .)
Sri Lanka, the one country in the world where Internet does not exist.
A ship bound for the Colombo harbour dropped anchor. On the undersea telecommunications cable. And severed it. So Sri Lanka has no Internet and no international calling. We’re cut off from the rest of the world. That happened last Saturday.
On Sunday, SLTNet, the country’s largest ISP, sent out an email to all their customers saying, simply, this:
Dear SLTNet Customer,
This is to keep you informed that we have lost the connectivity to global Internet due to failure in international submarine cable system. All measures have been taken to normalize this as early as possible.
We apologize for the inconvenience caused.
We will continuously update the progress on www.sltnet.lk
For further assistance or clarifications please contact our toll free 24 hours Internet Technical Help Desk on 123 or 2441 123.
Thank you for your understanding, Have a nice day!!
SLTNet Team
Well, goodie for them, they actually knew what happened fairly close to when it happened. Too bad they couldn’t provide more information, like an estimate of when it would be fixed, or what happened to cause it. Too bad they had to leave everyone else in the dark.
On Monday, it was on the news – but not in much detail – that Monday was the last day there would be outages. Everything would be fixed sometime Monday, and Tuesday would be back to normal.
Tuesday morning, it was announced on the news that repairs would begin. Oh yeah. We’re only on day 4. Why hurry? I mean, why stress over rushing these things? They – and who “they” are, I honestly don’t know – had to figure out how to repair the cable first. That, evidently, took four days. It’s been announced that it will be repaired by the 29th. But being Sri Lanka, that’s an estimate only and is subject to numerous delays and whatnot.
And then Fahim came home for lunch and told me more. It just gets better and better. Oh seriously. Wait until you read this. Unless this is breaking news in the rest of the world and we’re the last to find out? Right now, given no internet, oh yeah, that’s possible.
There’s a conspiracy theory going around that the ship dropped anchor because the “bloody Indians” (yes, that’s how some of the locals refer to the Indians – and Indians from India, not North American First Nations people, or whatever they currently want to be called) want Sri Lanka to hook up their telephone systems – meaning all the telecommunications cables – to India instead of Singapore, where it is presently. In other words, money.
The captain of the ship or officers of the company that own the ship, or possibly both (this is rumour and innuendo at the moment – you know, no way to verify sources given no Internet) have been arrested and fined. The dropping of the anchor being a deliberate act and all.
And they chose this moment to do it because of the auspicious Olympics. See, all available bandwidth on the satellites have been booked to broadcast the Olympics, and the backup for Internet/email were satellites. But now, because of the Olympics, no bandwidth – or almost no bandwidth – is available for Internet/email.
However, I suppose because no one wants to get sued, we ended up getting limited – and sporadic – email. So email is resumed, somewhat, but Internet will be delayed further. Yep.
See, only on Tuesday did I begin to get email from Saturday. And when Fahim came home from lunch, it had just started going through again, so he hadn’t even received all my email yet – it was that slow. So he got what he could and brought it home, and then he’ll get the rest when he can.
And today, Wednesday morning, in the news, it was announced that repairs finally began Tuesday evening, but they could not find one end of the severed cable. So more delays.
Still no Internet, but at least we have email.