Flag Telecom: Middle East cables will be repaired by Sunday

by John Ribeiro

February 7, 2008 —

Flag Telecom expects that its two cables that were damaged in the Middle East
last week will be repaired by Sunday, the company said in a bulletin on Thursday.

Breaks last week 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.

Indian service providers were able to avoid a major crisis by diverting traffic
from the Mediterranean routes to links in the Asia-Pacific region. Increased
latency of traffic on account of the new routing however resulted in slower
Internet access and poor quality of voice communications, according to the Internet
Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI).

Large Indian outsourcers, who depend on communications and the Internet for
their business, said the impact on their business was marginal, as they already
have enough of redundancy in their communications infrastructure. Smaller operations
were however hit. Some call centers in India have privately reported frequent
drops in calls from customers.

Flag Telecom also reported last week that another submarine Internet cable
owned by the company, called Falcon, had been cut Friday at a location 56 kilometers
from Dubai, on a segment between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman. This
cable is also expected to be repaired Sunday, the company said.

The damage to three cables in the area has sparked off speculation in blogs
that there was sabotage. Flag Telecom said on Thursday that the break in the
Falcon cable from UAE to Oman was because of an abandoned ship anchor, though
it did not give a reason for the break in its Europe-Asia cable.

The breaks in the Middle East have helped to emphasize the need for adequate
backups to the existing links, particularly as premium traffic from India’s
outsourcing industry travel through the Middle East cables, said Rajesh Chharia,
president of the ISPAI.

IDG News Service