Internet performance seen by PingER and Mid-East instability

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 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. 

Internet access to all Libyan hosts that we monitor was lost on March 04-08, with access to Libya Telecom and Technology in Tripoli once again being accessible at 8:00pm GMT March 9th, 2011. The other nodes were still not accessible. More information on the Libyan Internet cut off can be found at: http://www.renesys.com/blog/2011/02/libyan-disconnect-1.shtml

We tried adding more Libyan hosts to monitor. However, all were unreachable or like www.sadeem.com.ly, which used to be located in Libya, had moved the home sites to other countries. In the case of www.sadeem.com.ly the proxy home site was in the U.S.

Algeria, Bahrain, Morocco, 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 Moroccan hosts up to when we gathered the data (midnight + 1 second GMT time 2/21/2011).

 We will also continue to monitor 3 hosts in Algeria, 1 in Bahrain, and 2 hosts in Tunisia to look for accessibility.