Front Page

Cable cut disrupts net services

New Delhi: India is among the countries that have been hit by the undersea cable damage that occurred in the Mediterranean, disrupting Internet and communication links between Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Even as large Indian BPOs moved traffic to back-up routes and circuits, smaller call centres that rely on Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) were hit the most.

S.V. Ramana, president, Other Service Providers Association of India (OSPAI), said the larger BPO which used IPLC and MPLS continue to run smoothly. “However, BPOs which are serving the U.K. market in a big way may have been hit, as only half of the cable system is currently in use on the Atlantic route. Also, smaller companies which use the Internet as core network connectivity for serving clients are likely to see congestion, and higher latency.” BPO major Genpact said there was no disruption in its operations or services due to diversity in cable routes and service providers that are built into its network, its technology framework and redundancy.

Quatrro founder Raman Roy too said his company’s network had enough redundancies, and was able to reroute traffic, immediately.

“The SMW4 carries a lot of Internet and voice traffic from India. We also have circuits on SMW4, but we were not impacted as we have a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity policy. We have redundancy on both the trans-Atlantic and also the trans-Pacific routes, and so there was no impact on our customers,” Ranjit Narasimhan, president and CEO of HCL BPO, said.

© Copyright 2000 - 2009 The Hindu