Introduction
February 2011 saw much instability in North African and Middle Eastern countries including Tunisia, Egypt, Algeria, Bahrain, Libya, and Morocco. In some of these countries such as Egypt and Libya there were overt efforts to limit Internet access. It is interesting to see the consequent impact of Internet performance to these countries.
Egypt
See Egypt shuts down their Internet
Libya
PingER monitor monitors 3 hosts in Libya. Below we see smokeping plots of their performance around the 19 February. The plots show the loss rate (black = no access) as the background color, the blue line shows the median Round Trip Time (RTT) with the gray shading showing the jitter. The first major ouatge occurs for all 3 hosts between midnight and 0600hrs GMT on February 19th.
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SLAC to Al-Fateh University, Aeronautical Engineering Department in Tripoli | SLAC to AWS Hotel Reservations in Tripoli | SLAC to Libya Telecom and Technology in Tripoli |
Algeria, Bahrain,
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Morocco,
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Tunisia
We have not seen inaccessibility of hosts in these countries as of the end of February 20th 2011. SLAC monitors 3 hosts in Morocco. Below we see the Smokeping plots for the Moroccon up to when we gathered the data (midnight + 1 seond second GMT time 2/21/2011).
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SLAC to the Association du Gharb pour la Protection de L'Environment in Kamitra | SLAC to a host in Fez, Morocco | SLAC to Morocco Research Wide Area Network in Rabat |
We will also continue to monitor 3 hosts in Algeria, 1 in Bahrain, and 2 hosts in Tunisia to look for accessibility.