Several cyber cafes in the city reported a major disruption in internet services yesterday, as the slowdown of the services has continued. The slowdown has been caused due to the damage caused to the submarine cables in the Mediterranean Sea that last Friday. Repair work of the cables was to be completed by today, but Qtel sources said they had no updates on the situation. Sources from several internet cafes told The Peninsula yesterday that they were forced to turn away many customers as the internet connection was either too slow or not available at all. “The service was interrupted from 10am to 5pm. The service, however, improved later in the evening. We had hardly 30 customers from morning until evening,” said a source from a cyber café located in the old airport area. When The Peninsula visited the café around 4.30pm, there were hardly any customers inside. The café operators were seen explaining the problem to the visitors, many of whom were finally turned away. The sources said even after the cable glitch, internet connection was not so badly affected as yesterday. “We used to get around 200 customers in a day on an average and their number has come down to around 180 after the slowdown. We had the lowest number of visitors yesterday,” they said. “We are connected to the internet but the service is too slow. We had very few customers today,” said the source around 5pm. A source from another café located on the outskirts of the city, however, said internet access and speed were the same yesterday as in the previous days. Qtel has already clarified that users may experience slower than usual speeds when downloading large files. It is yet not clear as to how long the repair work on the cables would take. Europe Asia said it expected to have the sub-sea cable repaired by today, although that was dependent on weather and how badly the damage to the cable was. France Telecom said it expected to repair SEA-ME-WE4 by December 25 and SEA-ME-WE3 by the end of the year. Experts have warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and that the knock-on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies. http://thepeninsulaqatar.com/Display_news.asp?section=Local_News&subsection=Qatar+News&month=December2008&file=Local_News2008122651159.xml

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