India Works to Resume Internet Services

Bandwidth providers shifted India's Internet traffic to cables under the Pacific Ocean on Friday and said that by day's end they expected service to be back to about 80 percent of its speed before two cables were cut beneath the Mediterranean Sea.

The disruptions cost India half its bandwidth, leaving the country's lucrative outsourcing industry struggling with Internet slowdowns and outages.

The situation improved Friday as international bandwidth providers shifted their Internet traffic to the Pacific route, significantly upgrading India's Web access, said Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India.

Many companies said their Internet access had already gotten better.

"We've been getting and sending emails normally. Compared to yesterday connectivity is certainly improved," said Praveen Mathur of Streit India Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd., an investment consulting firm based in New Delhi that has clients in the United States and Canada.

The Mediterranean Sea cables, which lie north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, snapped Wednesday as the work day was ending in India.

Workers will not know for sure what caused the cuts until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, though there was speculation a ship's anchor was to blame.

The impact was not immediately apparent in India, but it was in Middle Eastern countries.

India's communications and information technology ministry issued a statement late Thursday saying underwater fiber optic cables usually take 15 days to repair, but they expected they'd be fixed in 10 days.

The Internet disruption raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call," while one in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.

They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online in London, adding that ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" life without the Internet.

Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.