The Hindu Business Line : Net connectivity improving

New Delhi, Jan. 31 Internet users in the country continued to get slow and disrupted connectivity for the second day today after two major under-sea cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged on Wednesday.

However, most of the large bandwidth providers such as Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, BT and Bharti Airtel said that the situation had improved as they had managed to route Internet traffic through alternate cables.

“Though the situation has improved, we are still experiencing problems on the connectivity side,” said Mr Rajesh Chharia, President, Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI).

The Business Process Outsourcing industry, which is a major consumer of international bandwidth, said the cable damage has had minimal impact.

“BPO companies build 5 levels of redundancy to cope with such eventualities. So there is no cause for concern,” said Mr Raman Roy, Chairman and Managing Director, Quatrro BPO solutions.

Repairs expedited

The Government, meanwhile, said that nearly 30 per cent of the links damaged due to the cable cut in the Mediterranean Sea has been restored.

In a statement, the Department of Telecom said, “ VSNL, Reliance and Bharti Airtel are in constant touch with Telecom Egypt to ensure the speedy repair of the SEMEWE-4 Cable (SMW-4) and FLAG Cable connecting India to Western Europe. It is expected that the links will be completely restored by the ILD operators within 10 days by expediting the repair of cables.”

Two under sea cables – Reliance owned FLAG and a consortium run Se-Me-We-4 were damaged on Wednesday morning. The repair work has already begun but it could take 10-15 days to restore the cable completely.

While the exact cause of the snapping of the cable is not known, it is believed that the disruption may have been caused by the anchor of a ship that had been diverted from the port of Alexandria in Egypt due to bad weather.

While this has completely shut down Net connectivity in countries such as Egypt, the impact on India has been limited due to the availability of alternate cable networks.

There are 7 major cables connecting India to the rest of the world with a total capacity of around 700 Gbps. Of this, the two damaged cables account for only about 100 Gbps.

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