BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India's vital outsourcing industry was grappling with major communications disruption Thursday after damage to undersea cables thousands of kilometres away in the Mediterranean.
Internet connections may take days to return to normal, businesses said, adding that telecommunications in neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were also affected.
"Information-technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected," said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India.
"Some of them are re-routing through the Pacific as a backup, but the voice quality and speed of traffic will be highly degraded," he said, adding this solution left operators with half their normal bandwidth.
Egyptian officials said Wednesday that an undersea fibre optic communications cable had been cut, while in Kuwait the government said "weather conditions and maritime traffic" had damaged two cables, affecting most of the region.
It was unclear when the connections between Europe and the Middle East -- and South Asia -- would be repaired, although the worst estimates predicted disruption for up to 15 days.
India's 11-billion-dollar outsourcing industry is made up of 1,250 companies that deliver services ranging from answering customer queries to processing credit card and mortgage applications and analysing equity markets for global clients.
The industry operates from 30 cities in India and employs 700,000 people, serving clients mainly in the US and Europe that sought to cut costs by farming out work to the country.
"Linkage to the world is our lifeline," said Raman Roy, chairman and managing director of call-centre company Quatrro, which has resorted to using backup lines via satellite.
"Our centres are not impacted because we have automatic alternative routing in place, but smaller centres would be adversely affected," Roy said, estimating that 20 percent of the industry had been cut off.
The disruption illustrates the importance of outsourcing companies having back-up systems for emergencies, whether they be electricity outages or breakdowns in captive power generation systems or Internet blackouts, Roy said.
Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth-largest software maker, experienced a deterioration in voice quality during conference calls with clients in the US because of the "uninformed outage," said Srinivasu C.P., the company's head of networking systems.
Satyam switched to backup systems, but the speed of Internet traffic had slowed, he said.
Zenta, which does analytical work related to investment, financing and servicing of real-estate assets, had rerouted through the Pacific by the time the US opened for business, said Devesh Bahl, head of analytical services.
The disruption had served as a test of the company's backup systems and "disaster recovery" plans, he said.
Genpact, India's biggest call-centre firm, said it was working with "various service providers on alternative routes, connections and capacity until normalcy is restored."
Neighbouring Bangladesh was also hit by fallout from the cable cut.
"The voice and data traffic bound for Europe and America is not working. It slowed down the Internet services in the country," said an official from the state-owned Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board.
"Most of the ISPs and call centers have been partially affected," he said.
Another Bangladesh provider, BDCom, said it was running at a quarter of its usual capacity.
Sri Lanka also faced a drastic drop in service quality, according to Sri Lanka Telecom, the country's largest Internet service provider.
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