Indian internet capacity down to 80%

Bangalore: India's internet services were operating at about 80 per cent of capacity on Friday after breaks in undersea cables disrupted web access, and normal services could be restored in a week, an industry official said.

The underseas cable connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, affecting internet access in the Gulf and south Asia.

India's booming outsourcing industry, which provides a range of back-office services like insurance claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the internet, played down the disruption, saying it had back-up plans in place.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said service providers were diverting Internet traffic to ensure there was no disruption in services.

"I would say 70 to 80 per cent of the Internet services are operating normally now. It will take about a week to bring the services back to normal," Chharia said. "Though we will continue to see some latency, there won't be any choking in Internet access that we saw in the last couple of days."

He said cable repair ships had already been sent to fix the breaches, which are in segments of two intercontinental cables known as SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG.

A spokesman for FLAG in Mumbai has declined comment on the state of restoration of operations but Punit Garg, chief executive officer of FLAG Telecom, said on Thursday the cable breaks would not cause any revenue loss to the company.

"Where the cable cut has happened, we are building a new cable over there, which is the FLAG Med-iterranean cable, which will connect Egypt to France," Garg told an investor conference call.

"So in future we will see that FLAG will have a fully redundant and resilient network... For our enterprise customers, that [connectivity] is being taken care through the restoration on other alternate hubs."

FLAG is a wholly-owned subsidiary of India's No 2 mobile operator Reliance Communications and it operates a cable network of 65,000 route kilometres connecting the US, Europe, Middle East and Asia.

Restoration

"Connectivity has been restored to a large number of our customers," said a spokesman for Videsh Sanchar Nigam Ltd, an internet service provider.

Officials at outsourcing firms in India said many had alternate networks and traffic was routed to a different link in the event of a breakdown. "We have not heard of any customer complaints so far because of this," said a spokeswoman for HCL Technologies, which offers IT solutions and back-office services.