For the latest news, the process of opening a third telecom license in Tunisia, and continues serenely on time. This process is currently in the process of answering questions of candidates for the universal license. This process of technical issues where the answers were made by the Tunisian State, even allow candidates to propose amendments to legal documentation of the tender and especially to the same licensing agreement. This phase should be completed by 13 of the month of March 2009 and responses should occur no later than 7 April this year and the submission of bids on May 5, so we should know the name of the candidate contractor provisionally at the latest during the month of June 2009.

Meanwhile, 9 serious candidates are emerging. There are of course the Tunisian Divona, Vivendi and France Telecom in France, the STC of Saudi Arabia, the emirate Ittisalat BSNL and even the Indian and Chinese PCCW of Hong Kong. This means that the Tunisian offer is great international interest, despite the crisis. This also means, as the same ITU (International Telecommunication Union) in a recent report that the telecommunications sector is not in crisis as some would say.

Source [African Manager]

Many sign and rumors give Divona most of the chances to win the bid as a new growing company and the only Vsat and Wimax provider on the country knowing the local market and having almost a wide Wimax coverage that can be easily used for other telecommunication services.

Tunisie Telecom has signed contracts with Interoute and Huawei Marine Networks for the deployment of a 3.2 Pbps cable between Italy and Tunisia, reports Tunis Afrique Presse. Described as the first 100 percent Tunisian undersea cable, it will start operating by the end of the year.

Via [Telecom Paper]

That's really exciting the first fully Tunisian owned undersea cable is a big investissement and we should be hoping for a better service and lower prices.

The capacity of the submarine cable system South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe-4 (SEA-ME-WE-4), which connects many countries between Singapore and France, is to be doubled by the end of 2009 under a multi-million dollar project. The upgrade will be beneficial to India, as the cable system in one of the major bandwidth providers to the country.

The doubling of the cable system would result in increasing the trunk capacity of the cable and helping it support increasing broadband traffic along the route.

The cable system, owned by a consortium of 16 telecom carriers, has awarded the upgradation contract to global infrastructure major Alcatel-Lucent and Japanese company Fujitsu.

According to industry sources, Alcatel-Lucent has been awarded the turnkey contract for upgrading certain segments, linking between Mumbai and Marseilles in France.

The company will deploy additional dense wavelength division multiplexing equipment (DWDM) - a data transmission technology - on the India-France link and upgrade a terrestrial link connecting Alexandria and Suez.

Moreover, Alcatel-Lucent has the overall responsibility for the end-to-end realisation of the Synchronous Digital Hierarchy (SDH), a technology that transmits digital signals with different capacities.

The upgradation of the cable’s link between Mumbai and Singapore will be undertaken by Fujitsu, which will again be deploying DWDM technology.

SEA-ME-WE-4 spans nearly 20,000 km linking 14 countries from France to Singapore through Italy, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia. It has 16 landing stations, including one each in Mumbai and Chennai.

India’s Bharti Airtel and Tata Communications (formerly Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd) are the consortium partners in India, with the latter also being the network administrator for the system.

The cable system had a transmission capacity of 1.28 terabits and was lighted up in 2005. India is served by around 10 cable systems, including the consortium cables SEA-ME-WE series, Tata-Indicom-Chennai cable,Reliance-owned Flag and Falcon, BSNL cable and Bharti owned i2i among others.

Via [Business starndard]

Tunisie Telecom has launched on the market FIXI a package which offers capped consumers with multiple benefits.

1.La mastery of the budget: FIXI allows you to define in advance the maximum monthly expenditure in communication for a fixed line.

2.The choice: With three types of packages capped: 10, 15 or 20 TND per month , the customer can choose the best suited to its consumption. Each plan provides for credit of communication:
-- The package gives FIXI 10DT entitled to a credit communication 11DT (for comparison, a reload card of 10 TD gives credit 9DT)
-- The package gives FIXI 15DT entitled to a credit communication 18DT (for comparison, the equivalent reload card provides a credit of 13.5 DT)
-- The package gives FIXI 20DT entitled to a credit communication 25DT (for comparison, a reload card of 20 TD gives credit 18DT)

3. The simplicity of use: The 1st of the month, the account is fed automatically from the credit amount of communication on the package selected. The credit has not been consumed during the month was postponed and combined with the provision of the following month.
If he has used the balance, the account can be operated by a credit of additional communication by means of recharging.

4. Flexibility: The client can easily switch between normal prepaid subscription, a subscription ceiling, and one package to another, free of charge.
Tunisie Telecom also offers free, with a first package offered in a subscription service CLIP (Caller ID) included in the package at no extra cost. The customer has the option of paying in advance and enjoy free with 1 additional month or 2 months' free for all payments for another 6 months or 1 year in advance.

Mr. Ahmed Mahjoub, Chairman and CEO of Tunisie Telecom, said: "This new formula, which provides an innovation in the world of fixed telephony seeks to revitalize the use of fixed telephony and prepaid part of the policy to revive that Tunisia Telecom launched in 2007 in the sector of the fixed telephony and the Internet. "

The new offerings make it possible access to ADSL. So with FIXI, customers can order a subscription ADSL and automatically qualify for a discount on the cost of ADSL access Tunisia Telecom.
-- With the package FIXI, 5DT discount is offered on the monthly fee for access to ADSL 256Kbps throughput;
-- With the package FIXI, 10DT discount is offered on the monthly fee for access to ADSL 512Kbps throughput;
-- With the package FIXI, 15DT discount is offered on monthly charges ADSL access for the 1Mbps speed.

For more information visit [FixIlFix]

You may have noticed a number of stories recently about undersea cables getting cut around the world. Apparently the total is now up to 5, but the scariest part of this is that Iran is now offline. You can also read Schneier's comments on this coincidence.

Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of Indian conglomerate Reliance ADA Group, has had two cables damaged in the span of a week -- a quandary it has never dealt with until now. As it stands, traffic from the Middle East and surrounding areas is being routed through various other cables in an attempt to remain online, but any more snips and we could be dealing with ping times eerily similar to those seen in 1993 (or much, much larger issues).

Via [SlashDot]
Via [Engaget]



Any coming war into the gulf? internet for Petrol pressure? I wonder what's coming next and I know that doesn't mean a simple offline issue, it's about something really dangerous.

Click to enlarge.

A third undersea cable has been cut, effectively eliminating the Internet in the Middle East. But according to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq.

Is it a coincidence that these three countries, who represent the next phase of the war on terrorism, were spared in the communications blackout that is affecting the rest of the Middle East?

...

The news of the multiple acts of cable sabotage are clear proof that a hostile force is doing its best to isolate the greater Middle East region (all the way to India) from the rest of the world. With the Internet down, it will be impossible for anyone to transmit video evidence out of the visually-embargoed zone

Via [Daily scare]

It seems that the recent Internet block out in the middle east is some kind of message in the next pressure methods, no more needs to troops invasion but a cut off of today's most valuable vital needs: the Internet.

If the rumors and the analytics are true, we just got into the so awaited star wars, where the fiction is the real new cold war between the so ever friends-enemies, perhaps the support of the middle east to Lebanon ans Palastinian resistance became an intolerable headache especially in the upcoming confrontations with Iran.

Though, the west healthy and pitiless is showing up his ability to control the world without moving army forces, a deadly weapon for whom the world is addicted, so can imagine in this time being unable to access the Internet or going back to dirty faxes and post mail?

Divona customers were deprived today from using the phone, the VoIP goes through dedicated connections with the customer down since this morning involving Tunisie Telecom, our Divona insider is hoping that the outage would be fixed within one hour. In the meanwhile all Wimax users are connected and can enjoy their Internet and Network up and running. Many customers prefers to get all their bandwidth through the Wimax to reduce the impact of the frequent issues in Tunisie Telecom T1 services.

NEW DELHI: Internet communication links for hundreds of millions of people in India and across the world were disrupted after an anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged two submarine cables Sea-Me-We-4 and Flag on Wednesday morning.

Internet users faced a slowdown in service with many websites remaining either totally inaccessible or taking a considerably long time to download.

While early on Thursday, reports of disruption appeared severe with ISP Association of India's president, R Chharia estimating almost 50% of net connections in the country to be down, damage control efforts by companies saw a near complete restoration of services by late evening.

"Since internet is now the nerve centre for business and communication, our real concern is focussed on lack of access for users. This episode points to a need for superior disaster management of the IT ecosystem," says Naresh Ajwani, president, Sify Ltd.
However, the situation did manage to take a favourable turn.

"Our teams worked all night to restore services to 80% of our customers and the balance will be taken care of by the end of the day", said Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel.

Sea-Me-We-4 is a 20,000 km optical submarine cable network which links the 14 countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

Bharti Airtel, India's leading telecom services firm and Tata-owned VSNL are part of the consortium that owns Sea-Me-We-4 while the Reliance Group owns Flag.

According to Kohli, customers will now only face a latency problem of about 700 milliseconds, but no disruption of services.

"Its been an extraordinary event, its impact has been most severe in India and the Middle East", admits David Nishball, president, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel.

According to Nishball, services to voice customers, private leased circuits across the Atlantic and private networks of corporates have been completely restored.

"However, IT customers have been severely impacted. We have rerouted them to the Pacific route from the Atlantic route, so there is some congestion", he says.

However, Nishball says that customer experience should see a dramatic improvement over the next 24 hours owing to efforts to put up additional circuits on the cable network to increase the capacity of the highway to accommodate the additional traffic.

Via [The Times of India]