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"Internet connections are crawling in Iran and text message traffic has been disrupted ahead of planned anti-government protests in that country this week.  The timing is raising eyebrows.  Connections have been poor since last week, writes the AFP, with Communications Minister Reza Taghipour blaming damage to undersea optical fibers under the Gulf.  \"The cause of the reduced Internet speed in recent days is that part of the fibre-optic network is damaged...The breakage will be repaired by next week and the Internet speed will be back to normal\", the Minister is quoted as saying.But the problems aren't limited to the Internet: Text messages have suffered disruption, too, a situation Iran blames on \"changing software.\"The timing is highly suspicious: February 11 marks the anniversary of the Iranian revolution, and opponents of President Ahmadinejad plan to hold protests against alleged election fraud.  The protesters have gathered worldwide support spreading their messages on Twitter and Facebook, making a simultaneous failure of Internet connections and text messaging somewhat convenient. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2010/02/07/iran-internet/>