As of approximately 20:46 UTC, four hours after this blog was first published, Noor started disappearing from the Internet. They are completely unavailable at present as shown below
As we observed last week, Egypt took the unprecedented step of withdrawing from the Internet. The government didn’t simply block Twitter and Facebook (an increasingly common tactic of regimes under fire), but rather they apparently ordered most major Egyptian providers to cease service via their international providers, effectively removing Egyptian IP space from the global Internet and cutting off essentially all access to the outside world via this medium. The only way out now would be via traditional phone calls, assuming they left that system up, or via satellite. We thought the Internet ban would be temporary, but much to our surprise, the situation has not changed. One of the few Egyptian providers reachable today, four days after the start of the crisis, is The Noor Group. In this blog, we’ll take a quick look at them and some of the businesses they serve.
Follow the Money
Noor provides Internet service for a number of Egyptian and international concerns. To name just a few, we see I-score, the Egyptian Credit Bureau; and NTG, the National Technology Group providing IT processing to the aviation, banking and financial sectors. The American University in Cairo also gets Internet connectivity via Noor, as does the Egyptian Exchange. As of this writing, these sites and many others hosted in Egypt are reachable, although access can be very slow.
To read the full posting on the Renesys blog, see: www.renesys.com/blog/2011/01/egypts-net-on-life-support.shtml
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