Indian link to hit Net cables

The cables hit by snags that have sliced the country’s digital pathway to half count three Indian companies among their owners.

One cable stretches from France through the Mediterranean and Red Seas, then around India to Singapore and is owned by 16 companies along its route, including Bharti Airtel and VSNL.

The second, known as the Flag System, runs from Britain to Japan and is owned by Reliance Communications.

A spokesman said Bharti was working closely with cable operators to “restore normalcy as soon as possible”.

In the evening, VSNL said: “Connectivity has been restored to a large number of our customers.”

Reliance claimed its services were not hampered. “The traffic on the route was immediately restored on another route,” a spokesperson said.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers Association of India, said most firms were “trying to restore their connections through the Pacific Region… making Internet access slow”.

Internet was slow in large swathes of Asia and north Africa, with the capacity in Egypt cut to less than half.

“Work has been affected to a certain extent,” said Shankar Ghosh, centre head, Tech Mahindra, in Calcutta. Few other big companies were willing to admit on record that they had been hit.

How long this somewhat degraded Internet connectivity will last will depend on how fast a cable-repairing ship can sail to a point in the Mediterranean about 10km off the coast of Alexandria and repair the undersea cables.

The crew will use onboard instrumentation to pinpoint the exact segment where the damage has occurred. The mode of repair will depend on the nature of the damage and depth of the cables.

In deep water, the damaged segment is removed with submersible instruments, splicing the cable at two points to extract the segment, and a repaired or entirely new segment is placed in its position. Repair can take several days.