February 01, 2008, 2:14 PM — Flag
Telecom will start repairs next week on a damaged submarine telecommunications
cable linking Egypt and Italy. A repair ship is expected to reach the site of
the damage, 8.3 kilometers from Alexandria, Egypt, on Tuesday. The repair will
take a week to complete, Flag Telecom said Friday.
Breaks on Wednesday in the Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable, owned by India's
Reliance Communications, and on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe
4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, owned by a consortium, disrupted Internet and other communications
to the Middle East and India.
Flag said the Europe-Asia cable was cut at 8 a.m. GMT on Wednesday. The company
also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching
to alternative routes for others.
A large number of customers in India were shifted by their service providers
from the Middle East links to Asia-Pacific routes. But the new routing increased
the time-lag heard on long-distance telephone calls, and also led to degradation
of Internet service to the U.K. and the East coast of the U.S., said Rajesh
Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI).
Some analysts said that consumers and smaller customers were suffering even
as providers tried to meet their service-level agreements (SLAs) with large
corporate customers.
The Indian government announced late Thursday that Indian service providers,
including members of the SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium, are in constant touch with
Telecom Egypt to ensure the speedy repair of the SEA-ME-WE 4 and Flag cables
connecting India to Western Europe. Repairing this type of submarine optical
fiber cable typically takes 15 days, but the Indian ministry of communications
and information technology expects this link will be completely restored within
10 days.
Another submarine Internet cable owned by Flag Telecom, the Falcon cable between
the United Arab Emirates and Oman, was cut on Friday at 6 a.m. GMT, at a location
56 kilometers from Dubai, Flag said Friday. A repair ship has been notified,
and is expected to arrive at the site of the damage in the next few days, the
company said.
