The Internet, mobile phone, cellular data connections and other communications devices have enabled modern society for near real time communications. With the addition of social media (e.g Twitter, Facebook) inter connectivity between people is improved greatly.

The choice of the Egyptian government to cut off communications brings about a thought on risks of global travel. Why the authorities of Egypt cut off communications is out of scope here but impact is not. Some of us handlers travel a great deal throughout the year and have been in Egypt.

There have been reports from several sources that mobile phone services have been partially restored but repeating Mark's check with dnstracer, Internet still seems to be down.

Tracing to www.eeaa.gov.eg[a]
 |___ FRCU.EUN.eg [gov.eg] (193.227.1.1) * * *
 |___ RIP.PSG.COM [gov.eg] (147.28.0.39)
 |     |___ NS2.TEDATA.NET [eeaa.gov.eg] (No IP address)
 |      ___ NS1.TEDATA.NET [eeaa.gov.eg] (No IP address)
 |___ RIP.PSG.COM [gov.eg] 
 

Due to over 150,000 Miles of travel a year, I asked myself "What is my personal disaster recovery plan in the case of communication's outage" and found that I had none. In dialog with the other handlers it was apparent that we rely upon global connectivity and an outage like Egypt would leave most of us digitally stranded.

In my travel kit there was not even a backup analog modem let alone any satellite options. After some research there are several possible products but this diary serves as a question to the ISC Community, what would you carry, if anything, to mitigate this real risk?

As Mark stated a couple days ago, please keep comments apolitical.

Richard Porter

--- ISC Handler on Duty