Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Internet. Show all posts

Syrian Internet comes back to life after a 19-hour blackout

The Internet is now up and running in Syria after a good 19 hours of blackout in the country. Connectivity across the country went down on Tuesday at around 11:30 PM IST and was up and running on Wednesday around 7:30 PM IST.

Internet monitoring company Renesys reported in a blog post that web services had been restored in Syria. “Syrian Internet is returning. First probes making it through, routing restoration in progress,” the company also tweeted from the official account. Other monitoring companies followed suit by announcing that Syrian Internet connectivity was now back on.

More importantly, Google, who’s Transparency Report documents Internet accessibility and connectivity around the world has removed Syria from the list of countries where service disruptions are supposed to be ongoing.

Back up and running (Image credit: Getty Images)

While it is still not officially confirmed what the cause behind this massive Internet outage was, the state-run Syrian-Arab News Agency (SANA) was spotted citing that it was because of an optic cable malfunction. “Internet services back to normal across Syria after repairing optic cable malfunction,” SANA wrote on its website.

Syria has been facing an upheaval with the civil war in progress. Cutting off internet connectivity has become a tool in the hands of both the government and the rebels over the past year. Besides Internet connectivity, telephone lines have been cut off periodically too.

Another incident of this sort in November last year saw an Internet blackout in the country for nearly three days. Outages in Syria have been seen to be lasting anytime between less than an hour to over two days in the past year.

Report by : Nishtha Kanal

Now that's a steal! Google to buy $39 million network for one dollar

Terms of an agreement between Google Inc. and Provo, Utah, show the company will pay $1 for a fiber-optic system that cost $39 million to build. (Also see: Google Fiber gigabit Internet headed to Provo, Utah)

Even as Google takes ownership of the municipal network, Provo will have to pay off loans for its construction for another dozen years.

Provo officials say it's a good deal because the system hasn't been able to pay for itself. They say Google will make upgrades and complete connections to every home.

And Google Fiber will offer basic Internet service at no charge for a $30 hookup fee far less than the current $700 activation fee.

Provo households are paying off the cost of the network with a $5.35 monthly utility fee, and city officials say they'll get something for their money now. (Also see: Google Fiber: 10 things to know about the 1000Mbps Internet service)

Report by : Associated Press

Internet grows to over more than 252 million domain names

VeriSign Tuesday announced that more than six million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2012, bringing the total number of registered domain names to more than 252 million worldwide across all top-level domains (TLDs) as of Dec. 31, 2012.

The increase of 6.1 million domain names globally equates to a growth rate of 2.5 percent over the third quarter of 2012, and marks the eighth straight quarter with greater than 2 percent growth. Worldwide registrations have grown by 26.6 million, or 11.8 percent, year over year.

The .com and .net TLDs experienced aggregate growth in the fourth quarter of 2012, reaching a combined total of approximately 121.1 million domain names in the adjusted zone for .com and .net. This represents a 6.4 percent increase year over year. As of Dec. 31, 2012, the base of registered names in .com equaled 106.2 million names, while .net equaled 14.9 million names.

New .com and .net registrations totalled 8.0 million during the fourth quarter of 2012. In the fourth quarter of 2011, new .com and .net registrations totalled 7.9 million. The .com and .net renewal rate for the fourth quarter of 2012 was 72.9 percent, up slightly from 72.5 percent for the third quarter of 2012.

During the fourth quarter of 2012, Verisign's average daily Domain Name System (DNS) query load was 77 billion, across all TLDs operated by Verisign, with a peak of 123 billion. Compared to the previous quarter, the daily average increased 16 percent and the peak increased 20.4 percent. Year over year, the daily average increased 21.5 percent and the peak increased 5.3 percent.

Report by : NDTV Correspondent

Fast fibre Internet connectivity is the need of the hour for India, says Eric Schmidt

So you might have heard that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt is in India, as part of his multi-country Asia tour. This past week, Schmidt has been speaking quite vociferously about what he thinks the state of Internet in the country is and the potential for growth.

Schmidt is in the country to speak at The Guardian Big Tent Activate India event in New Delhi and has been meeting with reporters and even wrote a column in a leading daily, exhorting the leadership to bring some Internet reform in the country. The influential Google long-timer had called for the Indian leadership to bring a more open Internet to the country, which has seen some unique examples of entrepreneurship thanks to the power of the web.

Let's talk about the internet

“It’s crucial for India to invest in and enable fast fibre internet connectivity within the country, between the country and other countries etc,” the ex Google CEO told CNBC TV18.

In the TV interview, which will be aired in its entirety later this week, Schmidt said that India has proven its capability and skill in handing the IT business in the past, especially during the Dotcom boom. But things have gone awry since then thanks to a form of complacency on part of the government and the current infrastructure seems lacking, especially in coping with the massive increase in Internet consumption. “My guess would be that having been satisfied with the great success of IT, the Indian government and the leadership made the same mistake companies do. They rested on their own laurels. They said, ‘Business is really good’ without understanding how quickly technology changes.”

Schmidt also touched on an age-old problem of bandwidth in India. “India’s connectivity to the net has always weak. There are insufficient undersea cables to handle the bandwidth, fiber optic cables are proprietary instead of public and infrastructure didn’t get enough attention," said Schmidt while also warning that the Internet revolution could bypass the country, if certain measures aren’t taken.

However, Schmidt was quick to point out that his interactions with a number of people have lead him to believe that there is no lack of commitment to changing the status quo. He even went on to say that the crucial fibre optic networks and high-speed mobile connectivity in India could see a growth spurt within the next year.

Yesterday, the former member of Apple’s board of directors was insistent that a $50 (roughly Rs 2,700) smartphone, which can hook up to high-speed Internet, was not far away. If such a phone does see the light of day in India, the share of mobile-based Internet usage will certainly rise meteorically from the current 25 percent, which is well over the global figure of 15 percent.

Asia enjoys fastest Internet speeds in the world

According to the latest ‘State of Internet’ report by Akamai, an enterprise cloud platform provider, Asia enjoys the fastest Internet speeds in the world. On the flip side though, Asia is also the biggest source of cyber attack traffic.

The report provides insights into the average connection speed, average peak connection speed, broadband adoption as well as the cyber attack traffic. Not surprisingly, South Korea topped the charts when it came to connection speed, with highest average speed of 14.7 Mbps. It was followed by Japan with 10.7 Mbps and Hong Kong with 8.9 Mbps. However, when it came to the average peak connection, it was Hong Kong that emerged the leader with mindboggling speeds of 54 Mbps. South Korea and Japan didn’t fare bad either, with average peak connection speed of48.8 Mbps and 42.2 Mbps, respectively.

Internet connection speed across countries. Data: Akamai

On the other hand, United States registered an average connection speed of 7.2 Mbps and average peak connection speed of 29.6 Mbps. While in United Kingdom, the average connection speeds were found to be 6.3 Mbps and the average peak connection speeds were found to be 28.1 Mbps. And if you were wondering where India stood compared to other countries, then you shouldn’t be too surprised to know that India doesn’t boast of great connection speed.

The statistics for India were rather bleak; the average connection speed in India was found to be 1 Mbps while the average peak connection speeds stood at 8 Mbps. Both of these are far below the global average, which are 2.8 Mbps for average connection speeds and 15.9 Mbps for average peak connection speeds.

The report also provided data on mobile connectivity. In the third quarter of 2012, average connection speeds ranged from a high of 7.8 Mbps to a low of 324 kbps, whereas the average peak connection speed ranged from 39.2 Mbps down to 2.8 Mbps. It also provided statistics on popular mobile browsers – it was Android webkit which emerged on top followed by Apple’s mobile Safari.

Interestingly, the report also provided data on the cyber attack traffic, which turned to be in sync with the connection speeds. As per the report, the countries with higher Internet speeds were the ones from where most of the cyber attacks originated. China attributed to 33 percent of all the attack traffic monitored in third quarter of 2012.

The data was gathered from across the Akamai Intelligent Platform about attack traffic, broadband adoption, mobile connectivity and other relevant topics concerning the Internet and its usage.

Report by : tech2 News Staff

Global Internet connection speeds slowed down in late 2012: Study

Global Internet connection speeds around the world slowed in late 2012, according to a survey released Wednesday that suggested a temporary stall in broadband gains.

Akamai Technologies' third quarter "State of the Internet" report also showed China remained the biggest source of computer attacks, and that Brazil and China appear to have the biggest surge in Web use.

The global average connection speed decreased by some seven percent between the second and third quarters of 2012 to 2.8 megabytes per second (Mbps).

But that appeared to be a temporary decline, since average connection speeds were up 11 percent year over year.

South Korea continued to have the highest average connection speed at 14.7 Mbps, followed by Japan (10.7 Mbps) and Hong Kong (8.9 Mbps).

Globally, adoption of "high" broadband (speeds above 10 Mbps) grew 8.8 percent in the third quarter and overall global broadband adoption grew 4.8 percent, the report said.

For the second quarter in a row, Brazil experienced the greatest year-over-year growth of 39 percent within the group of top 10 countries. China showed the largest quarter-over-quarter increase of 5.7 percent.

In analyzing Web attacks from 180 countries or regions, Akamai said China remained the single largest source, with 33 percent of all attacks originating within its borders. The United States accounted for 13 percent, followed by Russia at 4.7 percent.

For the mobile Internet, Akamai said Apple's Mobile Safari accounted for 60.1 percent of data requests on all networks, with Google's Android browsers responsible for 23.1 percent.

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