The Hindu Business Line : Net traffic here feels Taiwan quake impact

Internet services across the country were disrupted after earthquakes near Taiwan damaged cables used by Indian bandwidth providers including VSNL, Bharti-Singtel and Sify for carrying traffic to the US and South-East Asia.

While these damaged cables are not owned by any of the Indian bandwidth providers, they are used for routing Internet traffic through bilateral agreements.

According to Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI), nearly 60-70 per cent of the Internet traffic from India has been impacted.

"The situation is not bad due to the holiday season, otherwise corporates in India would have felt the heat. We think as much as 70 per cent of the bandwidth available has been reduced," said Mr Rajat Charria, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India.

When contacted, VSNL officials confirmed that capacity might have been impacted but played down the extent of impact. VSNL officials blamed Internet Service Providers for not putting in place restoration mechanism while signing the deal with bandwidth providers.

"Most of the ISPs do not want to pay for taking the benefit of restoration services. Those ISPs who have paid us in advance have been provided alternate routing while those who have not paid would have to wait till the cables are repaired. While none of the cables owned by VSNL have been impacted, some of the cables with whom we have an arrangement in that region may be affected," said a VSNL source. They added that steps would be taken to bring the situation back to normalcy within 24 hours.

According to a Sify spokesperson, the company uses five undersea cable systems for its bandwidth. "The Trans-Pacific was one of systems that could have been affected by the earthquake. There will be less bandwidth available, service may slow down. However, the services were not affected fully," the spokesperson, said.

The damage will not have any impact on international long distance telephony services because ILD operators themselves reroute the traffic through non-affected cables while in the case of Internet services it depends on whether the ISPs have paid for restoration services. Taiwan officials said that the repair could take as long as two to three weeks.

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