Great Internet Meltdown of Feb 2008

On January 31st, many parts of the middle east and asia lost internet connectivity as two undersea cables off the coast of Egypt were cut. They say that trouble comes in threes and so it did when a third cable was cut soon. But as if that was not enough a couple of more cables were cut in the following week. While access speeds in many countries slowed to a crawl, some were blanked out completely. MITs Technology Review magazine has an excellent article analyzing this internet collapse. It was speculated that the first two cables were cut by a ship’s anchor dragging along the sea floor. But Egypt has denied that any ships were present in that area at the time. So, it is still not clear what caused it. When something like this happens the situation is ripe for conspiracy theories.

However, there was a silver lining to this dark cloud. Most ISPs in India managed to avert a major disaster. Much of the high priority traffic was rerouted over lines in the Pacific. All of the big outsourcing companies also proved their mettle. They had contracts with multiple providers and were able to switch to their backup providers. By planning for redundancy they proved that they can handle such disasters with minimal disruptions. While these big players had the financial muscle to pay for redundancy, it is not clear how the mid-sized and small outsourcing firms fared. There is not much coverage in the media about them.

Tata Nano: boon or curse?

With so much media coverage, from Indian newspapers to international magazines such as BusinessWeek, it was hard to miss the eagerly awaited the launch of Tata Nano – the one lakh Indian rupees (roughly US$2,500) car. Coverage has varied from one end where this is being hailed as a watershed event for global auto industry to being assailed as a curse that will clog the already crowded roads and contaminate the already polluted air further. Comments posted by readers to many of these articles made interesting reading. Many readers congratulated Tata Motors on its innovation and bringing the dream of car ownership a lot closer to a great number of people in India. A lot of readers from India were gung-ho about this event and one could imagine their chests swelling with nationalistic pride. In fact, a reader of one of these articles accused fellow readers of being nonobjective and jingoistic.

Media predictions are just that – predictions. A few years from now there will be hard data that will prove or disprove these predictions. One must credit Tata Motors for a tremendous amount of out-of-the-box thinking. For one, they had to control the costs and deliver the product at the promised price – the number, one lakh, was a single point USP and had to be met (pardon the pun) at all costs. That meant innovative use of parts, materials etc. and economies of scale. Also, the concept of knocked down kits and having local shops assembling cars before delivery instead of being assembled in a factory is a dramatic, disruptive concept. Facilities available in these local shops will be nowhere close to the advanced machinery available in auto factories. So the car would have to be designed for reasonably quick and efficient assembly with not so sophisticated technology. Management guru C.K. Prahalad has predicted that many new innovations will come from developing countries at the so called bottom of the economic pyramid. Perhaps, this is one of those instances. Or is it? Only time will tell.

Unanticipated effect of global warming

Usually, global warming conjures up fears of melting polar ice caps causing flooding in coastal areas, unpredictable weather patterns leading to drought, flash floods etc. This month’s Wired magazine has an interesting article by Clive Thompson on an unanticipated effect of global warming – depression. He describes how the rapid drying of Australian outback has changed the landscape so much that people living there now feel displaced although they haven’t actually moved. To them the surrounding appears to be a place different from the one they were familiar with – inducing depression similar to that noticed in people who are forcibly removed from their habitat . Our planet and its environment is a very complex system and any imbalance is likely to have unpredictable side effects such as this.