Cable Outage Sees Tonga Fall Back To Satellite Internet (zdnet.com) 17
The subsea cable providing Tonga, a country in the South Pacific Ocean, with broadband, the Tonga Cable, has been out since 20:30 local time on Sunday night, with the nation now relying on satellite internet instead. From a report: Provided by Kacific, the nation's digital connection to the outside world is now a Ku-band satellite accessed through local ISP Ezinet. Tonga Cable Director, Paula Piveni Piukala, said Kacific is working to boost internet and voice capacity for priority communications. "We appreciate Kacific's assistance, as Tonga currently has no other internet or mobile phone connectivity to the outside world," Piukala said. "Kacific's satellite service ensures that essential services can be maintained as we work to resolve the issue."
Fragile network (Score:3)
For a network that was originally designed to be redundant and robust in case of nuclear war, there are large parts of the internet that have remarkably fragile connections to the rest of the internet. More than a few countries have poor to no redundancy in cabling to the outside world. Cut one cable and entire country goes offline. Mostly an economic issue obviously but still kind of alarming.
Re:Fragile network (Score:4, Informative)
"For a network that was originally designed to be redundant and robust in case of nuclear war,"
Yes, over the ground for the United States.
"there are large parts of the internet that have remarkably fragile connections "
Yes, small poor countries in the middle of the ocean. They have Ku satellite connections now.
Re:Fragile network (Score:5, Interesting)
The network wasn't built to be robust or redundant, it was designed to be cheap to install, decentralized and remain usable during war. The redundancy came in the form of physical structures and weapons, the network just had to be able to continue working if an entire segment disappeared.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
They still have a satellite internet connection, their redundancy plan worked.
But what if the satellite crashes? How would they get their instatweetbooks then? The horror of it.
A nation of cord-cutters (Score:5, Funny)
Too soon?
Re: (Score:1)
Different cord.
OMG! Emergency! (Score:4, Funny)
They are on their backup data route....
So, did the necessary routers adjust their route tables? They did. Data is flowing? It is? Well all went as planned then.
Apart from the bandwidth being limited and the network latency going way up, how's this big news? I mean, they can still get to Slashdot so they aren't missing anything important, right? (sarc off)
Re: (Score:2)
The entire nation of Tonga (Score:5, Funny)
Good!! (Score:2)
Maybe they could ration internet access to two hours per day, with rotating blackouts.
Then people might even go out and get some exercise.
Tonga is the most obese nations on earth, making Mississippi look like it is populated by Somalis.
Life expectancy has fallen to 64 in Tonga. Tongan life expectancy used to be in the mid-70s.[8] Up to 40% of the population is said to have type 2 diabetes.[8] Tongan Royal Tufahau Tupou IV, who died in 2006, holds the Guinness World Record for being the heaviest-ever monarch - 200kg.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]