High latency on links in and out of Europe from Asia/Middle East

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Posted by nauae, 04-14-2010, 11:43 AM
Is any one else seeing much higher latency on routes in to and out of Western Europe (UK/Amsterdam/Germany) from/to the Middle East and Asia?

Latency began around 7:30am GMT and has continued ever since.

By high latency we are talking about a route that was at 140ms/0% drops is now at avg 240ms/25% drop
Posted by FastServ, 04-14-2010, 11:49 AM
Would help if you had a traceroute.
Posted by nauae, 04-14-2010, 12:03 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FastServ

Would help if you had a traceroute.

Thanks for the suggestion but as the latency is "general" in nature and not specific, a tracert has not been supplied as any operator in the affected regions will have either noticed higher latency or not.

We operate data centers in the UK, US, Hong Kong, Netherlands and Middle East and have been able to establish that the latency is not an isolated ISP issue but a more generalised problem - possibly associated with either SEMEWE3/4 or FLAG.

The problem is that the operators of SEMEWE3/4 and FLAG are not normally that "open" about letting their peering partners/users know when there is a problem!
Posted by Paul, 04-14-2010, 08:12 PM
There's a cut in SWM4

*SMW4 Segment 4.1 cable fault*

Cable shunt fault developed on SMW4 segment 4.1 (Egypt / Alexandria –
Branching Unit #4A onward France / Marseilles) at 07:15GMT on 14-Apr. 2010.
However the shunt fault has further deteriorated and the cable segment was
down at 10:03GMT. Only four unprotected Singapore – London / Frankfurt
STM-4c IP trunks were being affected.

SMW4 NOC updated that there is a shunt fault in segment 4.1 between Egypt /
Alexandria and France / Marseilles with cable fault on Fiber Pair #2 at
1886.152 km from Alexandria towards Palermo. The traffic landed at Palermo
onwards to Europe was being affected, while the traffic running between
Alexandria and Marseilles via Fiber Pair #1 is still maintained.
Posted by nauae, 04-15-2010, 04:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PaulTech

There's a cut in SWM4

*SMW4 Segment 4.1 cable fault*

Thanks Paul, I meant to reply sooner but about the time you discovered the cable fault so did we and we had to do some work arounds for our customers in the affected regions.

Anyway, thanks again.
Posted by nauae, 04-20-2010, 01:05 PM
An update for anyone with clients/users in the Middle East (including Pakistan & India) as well as most of Africa.

The SEAMEWE4 (SMW4) cable damage has still not been repaired, and apparently is not likely to happen until early next week.

The effect on the regions listed above is dramatic, with most ISPs in the region capping bandwidth to their users by up to 90% bringing most activity to a crawl.

The situation is not just affecting traffic heading west, as the ISPs are routing traffic eastwards so that is saturating what few cables exist in that direction and therefore affecting trans-pacific traffic as well.