Akamai Unveils Unique View Of Internet Latency Disruptions Caused By Recent Undersea Cable Cut

As effects of cable cut continue to disrupt Internet communications, companies find business continuity with Akamai

CAMBRIDGE, MA . - It has been two weeks since two underwater telecommunications cables were cut and disabled in the Mediterranean Sea, impacting Internet communications to Egypt, India and Gulf Arab countries. The incident demonstrates the continued vulnerability of the Internet’s infrastructure, and the significant economic impact that lack of Internet communications can have on multi-national businesses. Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leading global service provider for accelerating content and applications online, announced today a first-of-its-kind view of the impact that the severed cables had on Internet latency.

Available at www.akamai.com/mideast-outage, data collected by Akamai’s global network shows the increased time -- beyond the average for a specific connection -- it took for data to traverse individual network points. Yellow lines represent a 1.5 times increase over the average latency. Orange lines represent a 2 times increase over the average latency. And, red lines represent a 3 times or more increase over the average latency.

“The availability of an enterprise’s Web operations is vital to building and maintaining its brand equity and customer loyalty,” said Robert Hughes, executive vice president, Global Sales, Services and Marketing, Akamai. “When a critical part of the Internet’s infrastructure is damaged, whole regions of the world can be impacted, as we’ve seen from this latest example. It is not that the Internet’s infrastructure is inferior in this region. What this event shows is the inherent vulnerabilities of the Internet to be disrupted at any time. Akamai is unique in both its viewpoint of these problems and our ability to remedy them on behalf of our customers.”

India has been particularly hard hit by the disruptions, and businesses continue to struggle to get their operations back running. With a high amount of call-center, Web applications and outsourced business functions residing in India, global brands have realized the critical nature of having a solution that can absorb these disruptions and keep Internet traffic flowing.

Indian-based businesses and multi-national brands alike have reaped the benefit of Akamai’s globally distributed platform for ensuring online performance and minimizing data loss.

“Indiatimes is the most popular Internet and mobile value-added services destination for the global Indian, and hence requires top performance and continual uptime for all of our global viewers,” said Dinesh Wadhwan MD & CEO at Times Internet Limited. “In the days following the disruption near Egypt, Akamai was critical in enabling the online properties of Times Group to remain high performing for our users from Europe and North America. Our Akamai-enabled systems experienced no disruption in service or performance.”

As businesses increasingly rely on Web-enabled applications to facilitate interactions with customers, colleagues, employees, and partners in remote locations, any sort of communications outage is unacceptable.

Akamai’s SureRouteSM technology ensures that business communications are not delayed or halted in the face of Internet performance problems. SureRoute leverages Akamai’s highly distributed EdgePlatform and unique intelligence about real-time Internet conditions to optimize routing and find a high performing and always available path.

Providing a unique managed services approach to Web application acceleration, Akamai not only improves response times, it also ensures applications are up and running when your business users need them most - anytime, anywhere.