What
happens if a country becomes cut off from the internet? It’s hard to think of that even being a
possibility in this day and age, but it can happen. Just a thing happened here in Madagascar
just a few weeks ago.
Madagascar
has three service providers that provide telephone and internet service to its
population. Just a few weeks ago Telma’s,
the largest of the three providers, undersea line was cut and the provider’s
entire internet service went down. This
would not be such a big deal with there being other providers, but Telma is used
by a large majority of the people and businesses here in Madagascar. This meant that places like the Bank of
Africa, the Embassy, and most of the local internet cafes all went down. A whole country seemingly came to a crashing
halt. It was reported that Telma had to
run a new undersea line from South Africa
and that the process would probably take approximately 15 days. This put Telma in a frenzy to find a solution
for its most prominent clients.
Fortunately, they were able to broker a deal with Orange,
the country’s second largest provider, to siphon some of their bandwidth. This allowed the Bank to come back online and
more prominent offices to do limited work.
This all
happened about a week after the internet went down but I was unaware of it till
a few days afterwards. Where I live, and
in my regional office, we were down for the entirety of the time the internet
was down. Since our entire workload is
based through the internet we were cut off from it all. This is not that big of a deal in the grand
scheme of things. It wasn’t that long
ago that everything was done on paper or in person/phone call. But it was something we all took for granted. A world without internet is a little
liberating and I enjoyed the freedom that it brought, but it sure makes things
so much harder.