Armenia Online

It wasn’t even a week after our arrival to Armenia and I had a DSL line installed in our new home. Daniel has Internet access at work and I, at home, am cut off from the world without it. The Embassy has an employee association, which we immediately joined as they offer a wide range of services that we wanted to use. There is a commissary with US grocery products, DVD rental, gym, tailor, hairdresser, dry-cleaning, etc.

They also offer the service of installing and providing a DSL in those diplomatic residences in which the quality of the phone lines allows them to do so. We are lucky enough to live in a newly erected building and the phone lines are pristine. An embassy employee, Avetik, came to our house, tested the phone jacks and enlightened me that we already have a DSL line. It was in the room with the washer and dryer and plastic shelves for storage. I propped the laptop on the ironing board and communicated with the world from there.

The next day Avetik called me up and said that in order to have the line switched to the office/guestroom, I have to call Fyodor, who is in charge of telecommunications in our building. With my broken Russian I spoke to Fyodor over the phone, he had no idea who I was or what I was talking about, but I got him to promise that he would come after two o’clock. I was utterly surprised when the doorbell rang at 2:30. It was two of Fyodor’s assistants. This time in Armenian, I explained what I needed. They did not get it and called Fyodor. Then they unscrewed the cover of the phone jack they fiddled with some thin colorful cables and in ten minutes, the line was in the office. The Internet worked, but since they did this, our other phone lines are fuzzy. You can’t have everything, I guess.

Armenia is located in the southwestern corner of Asia. To the south it neighbors Iran, to the east Azerbaijan; to the north Georgia and to the west Turkey. The border with Iran is open and Armenia has a warm and friendly relationship with it. The Turkish border is closed due to the fact that Turkey refuses to admit that the Turks annihilated a million and half Armenians. The border with Azerbaijan is closed because of the war over Nagorno-Karabakh. Although there is a ceasefire, there is occasional shooting across this border and the two involved nations hate each other. A lot.

Armenia and Georgia have a good, but cold relationship because Armenia has good ties with Russia. Georgia hates Russia. Above all it is because Russia supports the struggles for independence of the separatist territories of Georgia (Abkhazia, South Ossetia) and opposes Georgia’s newly found warmth with the West.

How does the political situation in the Caucasus influence my life? Since Russia shares a border with Georgia, it has space for mischief. Sometimes when the Russians are chasing Chechen rebels in the Pankisi Gorge, they “accidentally” enter Georgian territory. This pisses the Georgians off. Sometimes someone digs a pit somewhere near that border and punctures a hole into the oil or gas pipeline. The Georgians have to fix it and, unfortunately, Armenia doesn’t have gas either in the meantime.

Last week, a day after I had my DSL painstakingly installed, the fiber-optic cable was mysteriously damaged in two places in Georgia. Since the Armenian Internet network is routed through Georgia and it will take 10 to 15 days to repair it, until then I, an innocent (?) American, am left with a very slow Internet connection, if at all.

Radio Free Europe Online, Published: 2006-08-07 11:59
Two unrelated accidents disrupting a fiber-optic cable running through Georgia on August 4 and 5 sparked a widespread Internet outage in Armenia, Caucasus Press and Arminfo reported. The first outage was caused after a fiber-optic cable was damaged near the Georgian town of Kutaisi and led to a six-hour shutdown of Internet service throughout Armenia. A second incident the next day sparked a second outage after an undersea segment of the fiber-optic cable was damaged in the Black Sea. The Armenian telecommunications sectors remains vulnerable to external disruptions to its fiber-optic network, which is linked to the Georgian and Iranian networks to the north and south respectively. RG

View from our back balcony: these telephone cables tied to the trees lead to our building. Maybe it's better that the ones in Georgia got damaged...