Reply #7: India wrestles with internet outage

[EV_Ares]

Countries affected by the outage rerouted traffic to satellites and to other cables. Internet disruption effecting users in India and the Middle East looks set to trouble India's lucrative {outsourcing industry} and could in turn impact international businesses that rely on it.

India on Thursday struggled to overcome internet slowdowns and outages, which came after two undersea cables off the coast of Egypt were damaged.

The incident has halved India's bandwidth.

Outsourcing firms, such as Infosys and Wipro, and US companies with significant back-office and research and development operations in India, such as IBM and Intel, said they were still trying to asses how their operations had been impacted, if at all.

Rajesh Chharia, the president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said companies that serve the east coast of the US and Britain had been badly hit.

"The companies that serve the east coast and the UK are worst affected. The delay is very bad in some cases," Chharia was quoted by the Associated Press as saying.

"They have to arrange backup plans or they have to accept the poor quality for the time being until the fiber is restored."

Internet traffic rerouted

Praveen Mathur, an executive at Streit India Advisory Services, an equity investment consulting firm based in New Delhi with clients in the US and Canada, said the company's business would "definitely be affected" if the outage took a long time to fix.

"The internet service has been close to nonexistent"

Praveen Mathur,
Steit India executive


"The internet service has been close to nonexistent. Most of our ... consultation with our overseas customers is done online. The internet is our main business tool," he said.

TeleGeography, a US research group that tracks submarine cables around the world, said the Mediterranean undersea cable cuts reduced the amount of available capacity on the route from the Middle East to Europe by 75 per cent.

The group warned that until service was restored, many providers in Egypt and the Middle East would have to reroute their traffic around the globe, to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans.

Officials said it could take a week or more to fix the cables and several countries affected by the outage moved to reroute traffic to satellites and to other cables through Asia.

Such large-scale disruptions are rare but have occurred before. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in December 2006.

Link: http://mwcnews.net/content/view/19873/213/