The real economic danger of a monopoly - JSE Suspended.

TheRoDent

TheRoDent

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http://jse.hosted.inet.co.za/news/story/1892290
Trade on the JSE was halted and the futures closeout suspended on Wednesday afternoon due to a technical problem.

A JSE spokesperson said that the halt was due to a problem with the London lines.

She said that although SAFEX was working fine, when it came to the closeout, only the first 20 minutes of iterations would be taken on the equity side. The rest would be taken once the equity market was back up again.

I-Net Bridge
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All JSE trading goes via the London Stock Exchanges' information systems, via international links. Today, 20 minutes into the "futures closeout" trading sessions, the JSE had to suspend all trading, due to the rumour that a major Telkom outage affected the connectivity of their systems. "Futures closeout" is known as one of the biggest trading days on the JSE, due to a number of futures maturing, and the market going into a feeding frenzy in order to drive prices.

Trade resumed sometime after 17:00 in a "late session" after connectivity was restored.

This, is clearly, one of the most perfect examples of the dangers of a Telecommunications monopoly. The JSE has redundant systems. Lots of them.
Unfortunately, they're stuck with a single international communications provider. Telkom.

Telkom posted a 5Billion plus profit last week. Would anyone like to take a guess how much today's JSE suspension cost investors? Can you imagine how angry a load of Traders are today, after having their long weekends royally messed up?
 
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Hahahaha, nice one Telkom! And yet, things like these seem to go unnoticed by everyone else ... Hopefully some of those angry investors will channel their frustration and slap braindead-ivy around for a spell
 
Well it was not entirely un-noticed. Apparently a fibre ring at Newdoornfontein went down and took out a stack of international circuits including Internet Solutions and the JSE. So half of corporate South Africa was affected one way or the other. Could not have happened at a worse time for the JSE right in the middle of a futures close out, which has phenomenal trading volumes. Even DNS lookups for some IS clients were failing. Not sure how many other ISPs may have been affected, Vodacom seemed unable to browse UUNET sites at the time as well.
 
not to mention the money corporates lost that trade/operate internationally on south african based ERP systems. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. You know how difficult it is explaining this to the yanks and particularly the french????
 
Now, imagine some militant group planted a bomb at New Doornfontein? If this is how much damage a fibre ring at that Telkom site does, imagine what a well coordinated attack could do. It could literally cripple this country.

Well done Ivy. The internet was designed as a DARPA project, to be a resilient unbreakable network. Telkom, in .za has managed to turn it into the single best target for any madman.
 
Wondered why Investec SMSed me to anounce: "Investec Bank is aware of an international telecommunications fault which may affect your abbility to transact with your card in South Africa".

It was later followed by: "The telecommunications fault reported earlier that affected numerous companies, including Investec, has now been resolved by Telkom".

If they send this to all their customers, hopefully it will shine some bad light on Telkom...
 
TheRoDent said:
Now, imagine some militant group planted a bomb at New Doornfontein? If this is how much damage a fibre ring at that Telkom site does, imagine what a well coordinated attack could do. It could literally cripple this country.

Well done Ivy. The internet was designed as a DARPA project, to be a resilient unbreakable network. Telkom, in .za has managed to turn it into the single best target for any madman.
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Good point..
 
TheRoDent said:
The internet was designed as a DARPA project, to be a resilient unbreakable network. Telkom, in .za has managed to turn it into the single best target for any madman.
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In theory i.r.o the routing but remember the 9/11 attack that took out a major internet hub near the Word Trade Center and some folks were without the net for 2 days in NY ???.

Everybody knows where the 6 major hubs are located and you can cripple the Internet if you took them all out.

Internet is no longer decentralized ... it costs too much money to implement.
 
National Keypoint

TheRoDent said:
Now, imagine some militant group planted a bomb at New Doornfontein? If this is how much damage a fibre ring at that Telkom site does, imagine what a well coordinated attack could do. It could literally cripple this country.

Well done Ivy. The internet was designed as a DARPA project, to be a resilient unbreakable network. Telkom, in .za has managed to turn it into the single best target for any madman.
Click to expand...

I think this makes a very good case for these bandwidth nerve centers to be given "national keypoint" status.
 
tibby.dude said:
Everybody knows where the 6 major hubs are located and you can cripple the Internet if you took them all out.
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Here's an interesting article on the relatively centralised structure of the Net:

http://www.isoc.org/inet99/proceedings/1e/1e_2.htm

A bit out of date now, but it talks about how economics resulted in some +/- 80% of the world's Internet traffic being routed through the US, for non-US-country to other non-US-country traffic. Not sure what the current status is.
 
qDot said:
I think this makes a very good case for these bandwidth nerve centers to be given "national keypoint" status.
Click to expand...
VERY GOOD POINT, q. This is maybe something that COMSEC should take up and develop, with the assistance of other regulatory agencies and umbrella bodies - ICASA, zadna, ISPA, etc. As an interest group concerned with national 'broadband' connectivity (which includes aspects of information safety and security - data integrity, continuity, etc.), methinx MyADSL should initiate enquiry with these people, with a view to getting this ball rolling. Comments? RPM?
 
mbs said:
VERY GOOD POINT, q. This is maybe something that COMSEC should take up and develop, with the assistance of other regulatory agencies and umbrella bodies - ICASA, zadna, ISPA, etc. As an interest group concerned with national 'broadband' connectivity (which includes aspects of information safety and security - data integrity, continuity, etc.), methinx MyADSL should initiate enquiry with these people, with a view to getting this ball rolling. Comments? RPM?
Click to expand...
Perhaps this could be an active or proposed campaign...Peapod?
 
a fibre ring at Newdoornfontein
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More accurately, the SDH 2.5 gig ring

Now, imagine some militant group planted a bomb at New Doornfontein?
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They would do better to plant it at Rosebank, although NDF would take out the international links to SA. Taking out Rosebank will take out the entire internet in SA including Diginet frame relay, SABC 1, 2 and 3, DSTV, 94.7 Highveld Stereo, 5FM, Jacaranda, M-Net, some DSTV feeds and practically the majority of the telephone network
 
Kei said:
More accurately, the SDH 2.5 gig ring


They would do better to plant it at Rosebank, although NDF would take out the international links to SA. Taking out Rosebank will take out the entire internet in SA including Diginet frame relay, SABC 1, 2 and 3, DSTV, 94.7 Highveld Stereo, 5FM, Jacaranda, M-Net, some DSTV feeds and practically the majority of the telephone network
Click to expand...

plus about 60% of Internet Solutions....
 
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