<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0><TBODY><TR>Cable breaks hit Net service in South Asia, Mid-East, Europe
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Millions affected as 3 pipelines go down; disruption may spread to rest of the world </TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->London - Millions of people across South Asia, the Middle East and Europe have lost access to the Internet after three undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.
Huge numbers of Internet users in India and Egypt have been struggling since Friday to get online as a result of the outage, when the major Internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut, Britain's Timesonline reported yesterday.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said: 'Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the United Kingdom or the United States east coast are the worst affected.'
The three cable systems - SMW-3, SMW-4 and FLAG FEA - carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and the US, according to Britain's Interoute Plc, which operates a fibre- optic data network connecting 92 cities. The three cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy.
The cause of the breaks in the cables - in the Mediterranean off Italy - was not immediately known.
There is no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Mr Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Reliance Globalcom, whose Flag Telecom Group operates FLAG FEA. The other cables are owned by groups of phone companies across the regions.
The SMW-4 cable - also known as South-east Asia-Middle East- Western Europe 4 cable network - connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.
France Telecom, Europe's third- largest telephone company, said one of its maintenance boats in the Mediterranean area is headed to the region with 20km of spare cable on board. It is expected to arrive at the site of the damage tomorrow.
Priority will be to recover the SMW-4 cable, then the SMW- 3 cable, France Telecom said, adding that SMW-4 could be operating by Thursday and the situation should be back to normal by Dec 31.
'If there was just one cable down, we could have used the other two,' said France Telecom spokesman Louis-Michel Aymard. 'But all three are down, so this puts us in a very difficult situation.
The cables might have got caught up in trawlers' nets or there may have been an underwater landslide, he said.
One appeared to be fully severed, while the other two seemed to be only partially cut, he added.
In Pakistan yesterday, Micronet engineer Wajahat Basharat said that Internet traffic was slow and some of it was being diverted to other routes.
The disruption also reduced Egypt's Internet capacity by about 80 per cent. Technicians were restoring some capacity by diverting communications traffic through the Red Sea, said a Communications Ministry official, who asked not to be named.
Several Egyptian residents said late on Friday that it was impossible to call the US, but calls to Europe appeared to be going through.
Users in the Middle East said Internet service was either non-existent or slow.
Etislat, the largest of two telecom firms in the United Arab Emirates, said it was using alternative routes to ensure continuity of service.
Users in the Gulf Arab nation said their connections were much slower than usual and suffered occasional disconnections.
Verizon Communications, the second-largest US phone company, said it has rerouted traffic for its customers making calls to the Middle East by channelling it to Europe and the US and then down through Asia.
Reliance Globalcom in India also said Internet traffic 'from Mumbai to London has now been rerouted via Hong Kong, which may lead to congestion and increased latency on this route'.
Industry insiders warned that a domino effect was occurring, causing the disruption to spread across the globe, Timesonline said.
In January, an anchor severed cables outside Alexandria after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast. That disrupted Internet access in Egypt, the Gulf region and damaged traffic through South Asia's important call centre industry.
On Dec 26, 2006, a powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake off southern Taiwan damaged at least six undersea cables, which connect Asia to the rest of the world. The complicated task of repairing the fibre-optic cables took several months. Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP
</TR><!-- headline one : end --><TR>Millions affected as 3 pipelines go down; disruption may spread to rest of the world </TR><!-- show image if available --></TBODY></TABLE>
<!-- START OF : div id="storytext"--><!-- more than 4 paragraphs -->London - Millions of people across South Asia, the Middle East and Europe have lost access to the Internet after three undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.
Huge numbers of Internet users in India and Egypt have been struggling since Friday to get online as a result of the outage, when the major Internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut, Britain's Timesonline reported yesterday.
Speaking to reporters, Mr Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said: 'Information technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the United Kingdom or the United States east coast are the worst affected.'
The three cable systems - SMW-3, SMW-4 and FLAG FEA - carry more than 75 per cent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and the US, according to Britain's Interoute Plc, which operates a fibre- optic data network connecting 92 cities. The three cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy.
The cause of the breaks in the cables - in the Mediterranean off Italy - was not immediately known.
There is no timeframe for when communications will be restored, said Mr Sanjeev Gaur, director of assurance at Reliance Globalcom, whose Flag Telecom Group operates FLAG FEA. The other cables are owned by groups of phone companies across the regions.
The SMW-4 cable - also known as South-east Asia-Middle East- Western Europe 4 cable network - connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.
France Telecom, Europe's third- largest telephone company, said one of its maintenance boats in the Mediterranean area is headed to the region with 20km of spare cable on board. It is expected to arrive at the site of the damage tomorrow.
Priority will be to recover the SMW-4 cable, then the SMW- 3 cable, France Telecom said, adding that SMW-4 could be operating by Thursday and the situation should be back to normal by Dec 31.
'If there was just one cable down, we could have used the other two,' said France Telecom spokesman Louis-Michel Aymard. 'But all three are down, so this puts us in a very difficult situation.
The cables might have got caught up in trawlers' nets or there may have been an underwater landslide, he said.
One appeared to be fully severed, while the other two seemed to be only partially cut, he added.
In Pakistan yesterday, Micronet engineer Wajahat Basharat said that Internet traffic was slow and some of it was being diverted to other routes.
The disruption also reduced Egypt's Internet capacity by about 80 per cent. Technicians were restoring some capacity by diverting communications traffic through the Red Sea, said a Communications Ministry official, who asked not to be named.
Several Egyptian residents said late on Friday that it was impossible to call the US, but calls to Europe appeared to be going through.
Users in the Middle East said Internet service was either non-existent or slow.
Etislat, the largest of two telecom firms in the United Arab Emirates, said it was using alternative routes to ensure continuity of service.
Users in the Gulf Arab nation said their connections were much slower than usual and suffered occasional disconnections.
Verizon Communications, the second-largest US phone company, said it has rerouted traffic for its customers making calls to the Middle East by channelling it to Europe and the US and then down through Asia.
Reliance Globalcom in India also said Internet traffic 'from Mumbai to London has now been rerouted via Hong Kong, which may lead to congestion and increased latency on this route'.
Industry insiders warned that a domino effect was occurring, causing the disruption to spread across the globe, Timesonline said.
In January, an anchor severed cables outside Alexandria after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast. That disrupted Internet access in Egypt, the Gulf region and damaged traffic through South Asia's important call centre industry.
On Dec 26, 2006, a powerful 7.1-magnitude earthquake off southern Taiwan damaged at least six undersea cables, which connect Asia to the rest of the world. The complicated task of repairing the fibre-optic cables took several months. Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP