Nigerian 419ers now 404ers
Here's some very bad news for the people living in the affected region,
which at the same time will be a godsend for a lot of people sick of
Nigerian scammers and spammers.
Due to damage to the SAT-3 cable which connects Portugal and Spain to
South Africa, via West Africa, the entire region is facing severe
communications problems. Some 70 percent of Nigerian bandwidth is gone,
Togo and Niger are completely offline, but Benin has managed to reroute
its net traffic through neighboring countries. Much of Nigeria's
traffic is routed through Benin, but it can't find alternatives like
it's small neighbor, as there's simply not enough bandwidth to go
around.
The 15,000km SAT-3 cable is the only fiber optic cable serving West
Africa, and there are no practical alternatives, and there's a good
chance the problem will persist for quite a while. It's still unclear
what caused the disaster, but Telkom
South Africa, one of the shareholders of SAT-3, says it's investigating
a cable fault on the Benin branch. Ladi Okuneye, chief marketing
officer of Suburban Telecoms, Nigeria, says the SAT-3 consortium is
sending a ship to the scene.
Unfortunately, it will take the ship two weeks to reach the area, after it deals with a lot of local red tape.
More
here.