Internet services are almost back to normal, as users have noticed a remarkable improvement in the web over the past few hours. Meanwhile, France Telecom said Egypt was responsible for following up on the repairs of one of the main cables which were cut on Friday morning. Telecom Egypt refused to clarify whether it could have compensation from the companies owning the sea cables. Its chairman, Emad el-Azhari, did not make any comment, while, according to sources, the company did not get any compensation when a similar accident happened last January. Sources at Internet companies explained that renting capacities on cables without paying insurances is much cheaper. However, the lack of any insurance policy does not give the right to claim any compensation from the company in case of any cable breakdown. The Ministry said it has been able to reserve alternative routes to provide Egypt with Internet services, while more and more countries are affected by the cut of these six cables on Friday morning. The BBC website posted a report mentioning that scientific activities had been noticed close to Malta in the Mediterranean Sea. The report, though, does not indicate whether some cables were cut by these very activities. Meanwhile, France Telecom said a boot hook or some seismic activity had probably shaken the cables. The company said that one of the cables would be repaired on Thursday morning, while it would take till the end of the year to fix the other two. The executive chairman of the Egyptian National Telecom Regulatory Authority (NTRA) Amr Badawi said it was not possible to find the causes of this continuous cable cuts at the time. He pointed out that a big relief was felt on Saturday at 6 p.m. after the activation of alternative routes. He also explained that the Ministry of Telecommunications gave directives to all Internet providers to forbid subscribers from downloading songs and movies from the web and to allow them to download only small files by e-mail until the breakdown is fixed. Three sea cables were completely cut on Friday morning and three more followed suit later on. The regions affected by the power outage were mainly in the Mediterranean Sea between Italy, Malta and Northern Africa. Emad el-Azhari said it would be easy for Egypt to rent alternative capacities to find a temporary solution to the problem. He affirmed that cable-owning companies could have increased the rental prices, but they understood Egypt's position and also "gave us the priority". El-Azhari revealed that Egypt uses the same routes connected to the damaged cables, but turned these cables toward the south only and not toward the north, where these cables are. He said that countries like South Korea, for instance, would not be affected by the sea cable cut as they managed to host the world's main websites on their soils and do not very much need to resort to sea cables. El-Azhari revealed that negotiations are currently underway with major companies – he did not name them – to persuade them to let Egypt host their websites. An official source, though, said there is now competition to host the websites of companies like Yahoo, Google and Hotmail. "Egypt hasn't benefited as much as possible from its special position" he went on to say. "It could have avoided this crisis if there had been a sufficient inclination to host global websites." He affirmed that many countries realized early the importance of hosting websites instead of being forced to rely on international sea cables which transfer data from main Internet centers in the US and Europe. A member of NTRA Board of Directors, Othman Lotfy, said that if a person in Egypt now wants to send an e-mail to another person in Egypt, this e-mail is first sent to New York (where the mail server is located) through international cables before being sent back to the e-mail receiver. This means that Egypt always risks facing an Internet outage if and whenever cables are cut and this calls for seriously studying the possibility of moving part of the web load to Egypt, he said.
