The Hindu Business Line : Undersea cable damage: BPOs switch to back-up

New Delhi, Dec. 20 Business process outsourcing (BPOs) companies in India switched to back-up routes and circuits to serve overseas clients, after three undersea cables damaged in the Mediterranean disrupted internet and communication links between Europe, West Asia and parts of Asia. However, smaller call centres which largely run operations on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) are believed to have been hit.

India is among the countries that have been badly affected by the undersea cable cuts that occurred on Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We3, and FLAG.

“The SMW4 carries lot internet and voice traffic from India. We also have circuits on SMW4, but we were not impacted as we have a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity policy.

“We have redundancy both on trans-Atlantic as also the trans-Pacific routes, and so there was no impact on our customers,” said Mr Ranjit Narasimhan, President and CEO, HCL BPO.

Industry officials said the smaller BPOs that do not have redundancies built-in are likely to have been severely hit. “Larger companies have dedicated point-to-point circuits through IPLCs, and they are immediately moved to the spare capacity on other cables. Moreover, the large companies also have their own set of back up through alternate routes,” sources said.

When contacted Mr S.V. Ramana, President, Other Service Providers Association of India (OSPAI), said the larger BPOs, which used IPLC and MPLS continue to run smoothly. “However, BPOs which are serving the UK market in a big way may have been hit, as only half of the cable system is currently in use on the Atlantic route. Also, smaller companies who use the internet as core network connectivity for serving clients are likely to see congestion, and higher latency,” Mr Ramana added.

BPO major Genpact said there was no disruption in its operations or services due to diversity in cable routes and service providers that are built into its network, its technology framework and redundancy. Quatrro’s Managing Director Mr Raman Roy also said that his company’s network had enough redundancies, and was hence, able to re-route traffic immediately.

“While all our circuits on FLAG and SMW4 were disrupted, only one of our circuit on SMW3 was down. However, the back-up capacity on SMW3 was sufficient for us to continue our services to clients, despite the fact that nearly 60 per cent of our business utilises that route,” said Mr Anil Wadhwa, Executive Director and CEO of Respondez, Spanco’s BPO arm.

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Undersea cable damage: BPOs switch to back-up