emerging subsea networks - suboptic...gulf, as well as those in south asia, lost western transit,...

Emerging Subsea Networks

Copyright © SubOptic2016 of 5

EVOLUTION OF THE INTERNET OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Doug Madory Email: [email protected] Dyn Inc. Abstract: The Internet of the Middle East is heavily dependent on submarine cable connectivity and thus cable breaks and activations can have dramatic impacts on traffic patterns. However, in recent years, submarine cables aren’t the only factors contributing to the development of the Internet of the Middle East. In this brief paper, I describe the some regional impacts of submarine cable cuts in 2008, 2013 and 2015 as well as look at the growth rates of local markets over the past several years by tracking the number of entities routing traffic in each country. 1. INTRODUCTION

At a very basic level, the Internet of the Middle East consists of the entities routing Internet traffic in each country in the region and the long-haul (primarily submarine cable) links that connect the region to the global Internet. This analysis looks into the impacts of just a couple of failures of those long-haul links as well as looks at the growth of entities operating in each market. 2. DEPENDENCE ON SUBMARINE

CABLE CONNECTIVITY

The Internet of the Middle East, particularly that of the countries of the Gulf, is heavily dependent on submarine cables for connectivity, both within the region as well as to the global Internet. For connectivity to the global Internet, the Internet Service Providers in this region still depend primarily on submarine cables connecting them to Western Europe via Egypt and the Mediterranean Ocean. This dependence is starkly evident during major submarine cable cuts. In 2008, there were two such catastrophic incidents in which submarine cables providing bandwidth to the Gulf were cut in the

Mediterranean near Egypt. The first incident occurred on 30 January 2008, while the second occurred eleven months later on 19 December 2008. [1,2] In each case, Internet Service Providers in the Gulf, as well as those in South Asia, lost Western transit, severely crippling their Internet service. The visualization below shows how the first set of cable breaks in January 2008 impacted how UAE-based Etisalat reached the Internet via its various transit providers.

The immediate result of the cable breaks was the loss of westbound transit from Sprint, PCCW, Deutsche Telekom, British



Telecom, and Cable & Wireless (now Vodafone). Stepping into the void initially was Tata and later SingTel. The visualization below depicts the impact of the two incidents on transit for Bahraini incumbent Batelco over 13 months. In each instance, Batelco lost service from Reliance, shifting its traffic to Tata.

Five years later on 27 March 2013, the Sea-Me-We-4 submarine cable linking Asia to Europe suffered a failure.[3] Afterwards the Egyptian Navy announced that they had arrested three men with scuba gear detonating underwater explosives off the coast of Alexandria, Egypt, ostensibly in an attempt to scavenge for scrap metal. Regardless of the precise cause, the cut of Sea-Me-We-4 had profound impacts on Internet speeds in the region that lasted for weeks. Next is a visualization of latencies from Frankfurt, Germany to Etisalat in the months around this incident. In this case, latencies jump from just over 100ms round-trip time (RTT) to 290ms, as traffic was shifted to NTT and then was routed the long way around the world.

It was also the cut of Sea-Me-We-4 that led to the early activation of the Europe-Persia Express Gateway (EPEG), a primarily terrestrial Internet route that traverses Oman, Iran, and Russia en-route to Frankfurt, Germany.[4] The activation of EPEG established the first reliable land-based Internet path between the Middle East and Europe. Two other efforts to establish fiber optic paths linking the Middle East to Europe (RCS & JADI) traversed Syria and were sidelined as a result of that nation’s on-going conflict. However, the availability of the EPEG system has not significantly altered the dependence of the region’s Internet on submarine cables that traverse Egypt. With regards to the dependence of submarine cable routes traversing Egypt, the significant outlier in the Gulf has been Iraq. The following graphic depicts the counts of routed networks making up the Internet of Iraq over the past seven years. It also shows the counts of routes transited by Newroz (blue) and IQ Networks (green), two ISPs based in Iraqi Kurdistan.



As the Iraqi Internet accelerated its expansion in 2012, nearly all of the growth observed was transited out of the country by terrestrial routes to the north via Turkey and Iran through these Kurdish ISPs, and not by submarine cables landing at Al-Faw. At its peak, 73% of Iraqi networks were routed through these two providers. And if one counted unique IP addresses, these two Kurdish providers transited 86% of all Iraqi IP address space at their high point. [5] However, this trend was disrupted in June 2014 when the terrorist group known as ISIS took control of Mosul and destroyed a telecommunications connection point residing in the city. This event has resulted in a lasting reduction in the amount of Iraqi transit provided via Kurdistan by Newroz. More recently on 25 June 2015, Sea-Me-We-4 suffered a fault in the Gulf impacting Internet traffic in the region. For the most part, carriers in the region were able to effectively shift transit to backup paths, but some Internet paths, mainly from the east, were also impacted. From Shanghai, China, latencies increased immediately following the cut as the

lowest latency path via NTT became unavailable as illustrated next.

There were also intra-region impacts as well. The next graphic shows latencies by in-bound provider to Etisalat when coming from Kuwait City, each provider depicted with a unique color. The low-latency path via KEMS (as well as high-latency paths via NTT) disappeared with the loss of Sea-Me-We-4 and were replaced by higher latency paths via Level 3 and Telecom Italia.

And is always the case with any submarine cable cut, latencies improved from somewhere due to the elimination of a suboptimal path. The following illustration



shows latencies from Cairo to Etisalat falling (improving) as a round-the-world Internet path is replaced, at least temporarily, by simple hair pinning to Western Europe.

The previous examples notwithstanding, the Internet in the Gulf survived this cable cut with only minor degradations in service. 3. GROWTH AROUND THE GULF

The normal state of the Internet in any country is growth: more users, more websites, more datacenters, and in terms of Internet routing, more IP address space and domestic autonomous systems (ASes)1 Different countries grow at different rates and often these growth rates can tell us something about the local conditions in a particular market. Where a market isn’t growing, some pathology typically exists to explain the stagnation, whether that is closed markets (Cuba and North Korea) or a country experiencing armed conflict (Syria).

1In Internet routing parlance, an autonomous system is an entity, whether university, enterprise or Internet service provider, that independently routes Internet traffic.

By tracking the number of ASes that primarily route traffic within a particular country (domestic ASes2) over time, we can measure the rate of growth within a market. Of course, ASes can vary dramatically in size, from large companies to small non-profits.

But regardless of AS size, the metric essentially captures the “number of Internet players” in a country. It is the relative change in this count over time that can be most informative. The following table shows domestic AS counts for a subset of Middle Eastern countries (including Turkey) over the past seven years.

BH TR SA KW QA OM IR AE IQ

2010 18 244 71 31 4 3 99 10 6

2011 23 253 78 37 4 4 130 12 13

2012 22 253 80 41 4 4 178 12 16

2013 22 291 87 45 7 5 236 24 38

2014 21 307 97 47 8 6 277 29 39

2015 20 331 101 53 10 8 314 42 48

2016 20 370 110 54 11 9 367 57 64

Growth 1.1 1.5 1.5 1.7 2.8 3.0 3.7 5.7 10.7

2 An AS is considered a domestic AS in a market when at least 70% of its customer base is in that country.



When comparing starting and ending counts in this table, Iraq achieved the highest rate of growth (greater than 10x), perhaps playing a game of catch-up enabled by a period of relative stability immediately following the withdrawal of US military forces from the country. After Iraq, UAE had the highest rate of growth in the region over the past 7 years. Additions to the Internet of UAE include private businesses (for example, Lukoil, AS199878 appeared in 2014) as well as satellite campuses of universities (Paris-Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi, AS39031 arrived in 2012) and hospitals, such as the arrival of the Cleveland Clinic Abu Dhabi, AS59695 in 2013. Fueling this high rate of growth has been investment in Internet infrastructure most notably the establishment of a major Internet exchange to serve the region, UAE-IX. The growth of Iran is remarkable given that until very recently the country has been subject to numerous international sanctions and that the government has, on multiple occasions, directed throttling of international links to “preserve calm” during national elections.[6] Despite these factors, Iran is on pace to surpass Turkey in early 2016 in count of domestic ASes. On the other end of the spectrum, the Internet of Bahrain has changed little in terms of number of “players” in its domestic Internet over the past seven years, despite the best efforts of its Telecommunications Regulatory Authority to foster a more open and competitive market.[7] 4. CONCLUSIONS

While the Internet of the Middle East is still very dependent on submarine cable

connectivity through Egypt to stay connected to the global Internet, the severity of the impacts of failures to these systems appears to be lessening over time as new submarine and terrestrial cable systems come online and better restoration links are established. In addition, two other significant factors are contributing to the recent resilience of the Internet of the Middle East: intra-regional peering (aided by operations like UAE-IX) and the arrival of major content providers in the region (local content). It is these factors that are increasing the resilience of the Internet in the region and alleviating (but certainly not eliminating) the criticality of trans-Egyptian submarine cable connectivity to Internet of the Middle East.[8] 5. REFERENCES

[1] E. Zmijewski, Mediterranean Cable Break, Dyn Research blog, 30 January 2008. [2] A. Popescu, Deja Vu All Over Again: Cables Cut in the Mediterranean, Dyn Research blog, 19 December 2008. [3] D. Madory, Intrigue surrounds SMW4 cut, Dyn Research blog, 28 March 2013. [4] J. Cowie, Gulf States Turn to Iran, Russia for Internet, Dyn Research blog, 22 April 2013. [5] D. Madory, Kurdish ISPs enable growth of Iraqi Internet, Dyn Research blog, 22 July 2014. [6] G. Esfandiari, Iran Admits Throttling Internet To 'Preserve Calm' During Election, RFE/RL, 26 June 2013. [7] TRA rules Batelco remains dominant in data connectivity; reduces number porting time, Telegeography Commsupdate, 23 April 2014 [8] M. Brandstaetter, New Traffic Peak at UAE-IX, LinkedIn Pulse, 14 January 2016.

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