Internet recovering after cable loss

 

Gallery

By Reuters

Posted on 1 Feb 2008 at 09:16

India's internet services are operating at about 80% of capacity today, after breaks in undersea cables this week disrupted web access. Normal services could be restored in a week, says an industry official.

The undersea cable connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, affecting internet access in the Gulf region and south Asia, and forcing service providers to reroute traffic.

India's booming outsourcing industry, which provides a range of back-office services like insurance claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the internet, played down the disruption, saying it had back-up plans in place.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, says service providers were diverting internet traffic to ensure there was no disruption in services.

"I would say 70 to 80% of the internet services are operating normally now. It will take about a week to bring the services back to normal," says Chharia.

"Though we will continue to see some latency, there won't be any chocking in Internet access that we saw in the last couple of days."

The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables, says more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite.