NEW DELHI: Internet communication links for hundreds of millions of people in India and across the world were disrupted after an anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged two submarine cables Sea-Me-We-4 and Flag on Wednesday morning.

Internet users faced a slowdown in service with many websites remaining either totally inaccessible or taking a considerably long time to download.

While early on Thursday, reports of disruption appeared severe with ISP Association of India's president, R Chharia estimating almost 50% of net connections in the country to be down, damage control efforts by companies saw a near complete restoration of services by late evening.

"Since internet is now the nerve centre for business and communication, our real concern is focussed on lack of access for users. This episode points to a need for superior disaster management of the IT ecosystem," says Naresh Ajwani, president, Sify Ltd.
However, the situation did manage to take a favourable turn.

"Our teams worked all night to restore services to 80% of our customers and the balance will be taken care of by the end of the day", said Manoj Kohli, president, Bharti Airtel.

Sea-Me-We-4 is a 20,000 km optical submarine cable network which links the 14 countries of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France.

Bharti Airtel, India's leading telecom services firm and Tata-owned VSNL are part of the consortium that owns Sea-Me-We-4 while the Reliance Group owns Flag.

According to Kohli, customers will now only face a latency problem of about 700 milliseconds, but no disruption of services.

"Its been an extraordinary event, its impact has been most severe in India and the Middle East", admits David Nishball, president, enterprise services, Bharti Airtel.

According to Nishball, services to voice customers, private leased circuits across the Atlantic and private networks of corporates have been completely restored.

"However, IT customers have been severely impacted. We have rerouted them to the Pacific route from the Atlantic route, so there is some congestion", he says.

However, Nishball says that customer experience should see a dramatic improvement over the next 24 hours owing to efforts to put up additional circuits on the cable network to increase the capacity of the highway to accommodate the additional traffic.


Via [The Times of India]