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Indian IT weathers slowdown

BANGALORE: The Indian information technology-enabled services — much of it centred here in what is being called Silicon City — seems to be weathering the deterioration in Internet connectivity with rest of the world, caused by damage to two trunk undersea cables in the Mediterranean.

While a swathe of user nations in the subcontinent and West Asia reported feeling the impact from late Wednesday Indian time, the effect here has been reported to be minimal by key players in critical business process outsourcing sectors. This is because, almost all companies for whom the broadband Internet is a vital business umbilical, have standby solutions for just such situations. Most of them have entered into service level agreements with Internet providers who have in many cases switched traffic from the two cable systems known to have been affected: FLAG (a part of Reliance Telecom) and SEA-ME-WE -4 a consortium that covers South East Asia- Middle East-West Europe. These cables land in Kochi and Mumbai on the West Coast and their broadband feed is used by all major service providers including Reliance, VSNL and BSNL.

Typically these providers switch affected cables and reroute traffic to Europe and the Americas via Pacific routes for which Chennai and Singapore are cable heads.

Immediately after Wednesday’s outage in the Mediterranean, many Indian corporate customers experienced reduced bandwidth which means traffic was a bit slower — but no critical problem. During the day, some heavy users reported increased ‘latency’, that is jargon for the delay between the sending and the receiving of a ‘packet’ of information of between 20 and 40 milliseconds — which was not too bad. The largest contact centre player Genpact as well as other big outsourcers like Infosys, Wipro and Satyam, are known to have seamlessly switched to other unaffected routes — so for them and most of the ITES sector it has been business as usual after a small blip which they were all geared to weather,

IBS, a large Thiruvananthapuram-based operation that services the travel and transportation business reported feeling almost no change in its circuits. Smaller operations and non-call centre players whose broadband usage was not mission critical however were worse hit: quite a few Bangalore-based product companies said almost none of their emails were moving though things were getting better.

“The IT industry here is geared for emergencies like this. They have tiers of fall back systems in place to which they can re-route traffic,” explained Ajay Goel, Senior Vice President IT Services at Cisco Systems.

But when Internet providers hasten to ‘fill the gap’ in bandwidth for their big customers, the small players may suffer.

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