No network by Claudia Sonea

Looking for signal? "Don't bother; the cables are damaged again'' would be the answer of a Qtel customer. On Sunday, telecommunications provider Qtel announced that an undersea telecoms cable linking Qatar to the United Arab Emirates was damaged, disrupting services, this being the latest incident of this kind in less than a week. Last week in the Mediterranean and off the coast of Dubai the cables were damaged so bad that both the Internet and international telephone services in Egypt, Gulf Arab states and south Asia were disrupted. Also, according to Qtel's head of communications Adel al Mutawa told AFP on Friday between the Qatari island of Haloul and the UAE island of Das the cables went through a rough situation on Friday. Furthermore, the company has not yet found the reason for so many failures of the cables. He added that Qtel's loss of capacity had been kept below 40 percent over the weekend due to Qatar's large number of alternative routes for transmission. Tracking the incident the UAE telecommunications watchdog revealed that the disruption to Internet and telephone services in the Gulf state is most probably to continue for 10 another days. On the site of UAE telecoms provider "du'' there was a post saying that the owners of the Mediterranean cables, FLAG Telecom and SEA-ME-WE4, were fixing the damage, there is no accurate date for when it will take place, but the fixing of the FLAG cables will take about two weeks. It has already started transferring Internet and international voice traffic through other cable systems that are still standing and have not been affected in any way; however, the chances are that at peak times until the issue is resolved to remain without signal. Fortunately other UAE's other telecoms provider, like Etisalat, and Saudi Arabia's STC have not been affected. It is expected on Tuesday for a repair ship to begin work to fix the two cables in the Mediterranean Sea that were damaged on Wednesday, thus causing the disruption of connections not only in Egypt but also thousands of kilometers away.

related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080203/tc_afp/mideastgulfinternet_080203145959;_ylt=AtI3T2P68rBJSA6Ezdck_Pms0NUE

by Claudia Sonea for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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