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Can undersea cable wear and tear punch holes in our image as the world’s backoffice? Fortunately, we weren’t completely at sea when the undersea cable cut off the Egyptian coast recently, thanks to our geographical advantage of two oceans. But the incident has compelled the industry and the government to have a re-look at our disaster management plans, and create foolproof backup in the event of an emergency.

Internet connectivity in India faced disruptions for over 10 days before the cables were repaired and the links were fully restored. The breakdown affected international long distance and internet traffic to Europe and the US, which outsource their back-office operations to India. While big BPO firms saw less damage, smaller firms had a tough time in the absence of foolproof back-up plans.

Suddenly, businesses realised the need to check disaster recovery plans of their telecom service providers in great details. “There were no connectivity issues experienced by any of BT’s customers in India. I am given to believe ISP’s did report delays shot up to 1,000 msecs,” asserts Sudhir Narang, managing director, BT India. Reliance Communications’ subsidiary Flag Telecom, which operates the world’s largest private undersea cable system, spanning 65,000 route kilometers and four continents, says “Immediately after the cut, Flag Telecom had completed the restoration of services on alternate routes for all customers opting for pre-planned restoration services.” Industry analysts peg the cost of laying a 3,500 km submarine cable at $200 million, while the repair of such faults may cost $4-5 million at least.

“We keep building the resiliency in our network and our NGN project is in the same direction. We are building a new cable, which will connect Egypt to France. So, Flag will have a fully redundant and resilient network,” says Punit Garg, CEO, Flag Telecom.

Bharti also claims to have reacted immediately. “For certain customers with critical business applications on dedicated circuits, we restored the links over pre-planned restoration routes. For internet traffic, which by its nature can be re-routed around network faults, we immediately diverted the customer traffic towards the Pacific route. Then, we worked with other carriers to augment the Pacific capacity to reduce the level of congestion,” details David Nishball, president, Enterprise Services, Bharti Airtel.