Mapping Kuwait’s Connection to the Internet

Using this map browser tool you can see how any city is connected to the internet just by clicking on it ..

I’ve used it to see how Kuwait is connected with other cities ..

Kuwait’s Connected to the internet

As you can see in this image Kuwait is only connected to Dubai ( the regional provider ) and KSA .. ( It is also connected to New York Through Dubai ) [corrected]

Dubai’s Connection

Now the internet is decentralized, but still there are a number of large international commercial, government and academic networks that forms the backbone of the internet, and to rely on a one or two routes to connect to the internet is a very risky situation,it was upsetting to find out that Kuwait is not directly connected to any of those, in stead it’s connected to the internet only through Dubai .. I thought that this was normal and all GCC countries are connected through Dubai but the bad news was that Kuwait is the only one !! All the other countries are connected through 5 different routes ..

This is a very risky situation, because there’s a single point of failure, if something wrong happens to the connection between Kuwait and Dubai , a whole country will be disconnected from the internet .. No matter how reliable the cables are , having a single point of failure is a deadly mistake ..

Other GCC Countries Connectivity

KSA Connections

KSA Connections

Bahrain Connections

Bahrain Connections

Qatar Connections

Qatar Connections

Oman Connections

Oman Connections

Notice how Kuwait is the least connected GCC country ! all other countries have at least 5 connections..

Internet Map

Using data collected from a distributed scientific project Chris Harrison Managed to summerize some of the information in a very visually appealing way ..

Internet Connection Density

This image shows the Internet Connection Density, the stronger the contrast the more connectivity there is ..

city-to-city Connection

while this image shows the network connections between cities across the globe with the intensity of the edge contrast reflecting the number of connections between the two points ..

MrMMM on October 7th 2007 in Technology

12 Responses to “Mapping Kuwait’s Connection to the Internet”

  1. hamad responded on 07 Oct 2007 at 5:32 am #

    first of all .. this is some great website you have shared with us .. but i am affraid to infrom you that kuwait is linked to the internet thru alot of links .. and this is information based on what i work and where i work ..

    kuwait isp’s have links thru ..

    Kuwait to Dubai thru : gulf sea cable
    Kuwait to Dubai thru : Satalite link
    Kuwait to Riyadh thru : land cable and gulf cable
    Kuwait to New York thru : land cable

    and there are some that i cant mention ..

    for a profesionalissim in networking you cant ever have one source of conectivity .. every ISP has at least 2 routes .. and each isp in kuwait have defferent methods of conectivity to the internet backbone based in the USA so .

    this tool is a nice tool .. but i will be happy to provide you with the real diagram if you are interested ..

  2. Intlxpatr responded on 07 Oct 2007 at 8:38 am #

    That is absolutely fascinating. A paranoid might think it is a control issue, and a realist might shrug his shoulders and say that it is typical of the short-sighted way Kuwait plans for contingencies, like electricity, water, roads . . . .not a lot of emphasis on infrastructure.

  3. MrMMM responded on 07 Oct 2007 at 3:02 pm #

    Hamad:
    Thanks for correcting the post, I’m actually happy to be wrong on this ( and have already edited it ) ..

    (These diagrams show the connections between the cities whether there are multiple links between them or not .. )

    But you can still see that Kuwait is the least connected country among all GCC countries ..

    Intlxpatr: there were incidents where a whole ISP and it’s users were disconnected because of a problems in the LINK and I’d hate to see that happen again ..

  4. hamad responded on 07 Oct 2007 at 6:06 pm #

    Welcome..

    and to be honest .. yes we are the least .. because the people resposible for the internet backbone have choosen riyadh and dubai to be centreal nodes in the gulf region so its not our decision if we want to connect to more .. and we have almost 4 links to dubai now .. and 5 to riyadh .. the main thing is not how much cities .. its always conected .. and always available .. and the quality of service .. dont worry .. we are in the highest catigories and believe it .. dubai is a mowaze3 kahraba not a provider .. no one in the gulf can control anything .. not even the ip addreses ..

  5. MrMMM responded on 07 Oct 2007 at 9:50 pm #

    Hamad: well it’s good to know that we are in the highest categories .. but we are still greedy for more redundancy to avoid some of the incidents that happened before ..

  6. hamad responded on 08 Oct 2007 at 12:52 am #

    well .. to be more frank .. it only happened to one ISP provider..
    name i cant say .. the others were working fine ..

    ako ISP bel 3alam .. that has a route for a certain line and doesnt have imediate back up ????

    3 hours down .. and when i call them they say :

    he said : we are rerouting all the traffic to another backbone and other routers ..

    i said : manually .?

    he said : yes manual .. why .??

    ( smile ) i said : and you call your selfs proffesional a ISP.

    ( shocked ) he said : why .. this is our way ..

    i said : the least proffesional netowrk must have at least a back up line which has an automatic reroute .. just incase ..

    well ..

    this is the deal when you give an ISP to people who think they can handle it ..

    they think its only about Cisco knowledge , ATM and fiber optics with shwayat knowledge in configurations .. and wala .. im an administrator .. heh ..

    1.Strategy
    2.Conectivity
    3.redundancy
    4.disaster recovery.
    5. a packet of cigaretts with a guy elee eyeblik chay or coffee when a bad thing happens and you sit in server room :P

    anyway .. chenee garagt wayed :)

  7. speedy responded on 08 Oct 2007 at 1:10 am #

    one link from basra will give us great redunduncy ;-)

    we have links to jeddah as well

    and about basra we will be a good candidate to provide iraq with internet if things are settled, but do we think business?

    thanks for the post

  8. Bashar responded on 08 Oct 2007 at 2:27 am #

    MrMMM: I wish we can get more from you as your posts are so useful. Especially when they attract more insightful people like iHamad. Thank you for adding to the post.

    Keep it up.

  9. MrMMM responded on 08 Oct 2007 at 4:44 pm #

    Hamad:
    An outage of this kind happened only to one ISP and that wasn’t a long time ago ..

    LoL, sometimes they come up with the weirdest execuses and replies like “rerouting traffic manually!!!!” if that’s they’re way it’s much better for them not to give more details about it :P

    this reminded me of that time when there was a fire in another ISP and the internet was slow to a point that it’s useless ..

    so I called the customer service asking them whether they they had backup or not and if they did how come it’s not connected through that backup already?

    so her answer was that the police are talking with all the engineers and staff about the cause of the fire and they can’t go and connect to the backup because of that !!!!

    i’m no expert but I think that the idea of disaster recovery is that when Servers are down because of an urgent disater situation,
    some servers in another physical location automatically replace those servers

    ( let’s just hope that she’s been watching too much TV and made that up )

    “”" 1.Strategy
    2.Conectivity
    3.redundancy
    4.disaster recovery.
    5. a packet of cigaretts with a guy elee eyeblik chay or coffee when a bad thing happens and you sit in server room

    “”"

    Nice plan , you just have to come up with an alternative for number 5 if it happens these days during the day :P

    be my guest egre3 3ala ra7tik, sometimes the comments are more informative than the post itself and i think they are in this case :)

    –

    Speedy:

    I think that the ministry of defense will be in charge of this link :P
    Do you know which ISP is gonna provide that ?

    Bashar:
    Thanks a lot :) as i mentioned it’s one of the posts where the comments, feedback and discussion about the post is so useful ..

  10. speedy responded on 10 Oct 2007 at 1:53 am #

    well ministry of defense will be a good candidate if we plan to attack them with that link ;-)

    iraq is way behind technology because of the wars, but kuwait is a good candidate to be a uplink provider for iraq in the future, iraq population is 27 million while only 36 thousand uses internet! thats 0.1%

  11. hamad responded on 10 Oct 2007 at 4:31 am #

    about the fire .. well .. someone called me for help over there .. and i went .. and yes .. the police was sorrounding the whole place and i had to sneak in with a fellow officer to do something for them :)

    hopefully the link was up . yes it was slow .. but they were fully operational within 3 days .. now give me an ISP here in kuwait that can do that .. i was so amazed and dissapointed at the same time .. because of what you mentioned .. which is another physical location :)

    well .. we always learn from others mistakes ..

    and i also heard about an ISP who is willing to give a MOBILE satalite transmitter for who can pay that much incase of an emergency ..

    now thats what i need in ” almutla3 desert ” when i go camping for the winter :)

    basra line will be a tender .. that will of course be given to someone they have already choosen :) welcome to kuwait .. where the cake is cut into pieces and have the names on it before you even see it :)

  12. Ali Deera Chat responded on 15 Oct 2007 at 10:41 pm #

    dude … AMAZING WORK …. i think i am in love with this Harrison guy

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply