Repairs Start on Undersea Cable Cut Near UAE

BANGALORE (Reuters) – Repair work has started on one of three brokenundersea cables providing data services to parts of the Middle East andAsia, a cable operator said, and a repair ship was expected to reach asecond cable on Tuesday.

Undersea cable connections were disrupted off Egypt’s northern coastlast week when segments of two international cables were cut, affectingInternet access in the Gulf region and South Asia, and forcing serviceproviders to re-route traffic.

A third undersea cable, FALCON, was reported broken off the coast ofthe United Arab Emirates on Friday and Indian-owned cable networkoperator FLAG Telecom said on Tuesday a ship had reached the locationand repair work had started.

"FLAG repair team is operating in extreme weather conditions toensure timely repairs," the operator, a unit of India’s No. 2 mobileoperator Reliance Communications, said on its Web site.

FLAG said another repair ship was likely to reach the location ofthe FLAG Europe-Asia cable, one of the two that were reported cut offthe coast of Egypt.

Egypt lost more than half its Internet capacity because of thebreaks last week and the telecommunications ministry said at theweekend it did not expect services to be back to normal for at least 10days.

UAE telecom firm du said on Monday its Internet and telephoneservices were largely back to normal after it used a terrestrial cableacross Saudi Arabia to circumvent the problem.

In India, Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet ServiceProviders’ Association, said it would take at least eight to 10 daysfrom the start of the repair work for Internet access to be restoredcompletely.

India’s $11-billion back-office outsourcing industry, which providesa range of services like insurance claims processing and customersupport to overseas clients over the Internet, says it has not beenhurt by the cable disruption due to back-up plans.

Chharia said the impact of patchy access on other Indian businesseshad been largely mitigated as most services providers had found newroutes to restore communication.

The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables,says more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic arecarried by submarine cables.

(Reporting by Sumeet Chatterjee; Editing by Charlotte Cooper)

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