Rare Cable Rupture 'a Wake-Up Call' for India

NEW DELHI, Feb. 1 -- In the heart of an industrial zone and up an ordinary flight of stairs, young computer engineers buzzed with activity Friday in front of a huge screen tracking Internet connectivity in this country's booming service sector.

When Internet traffic slowed to a crawl late Wednesday after two cables were cut beneath the Mediterranean Sea, the ability of service providers such as this one to quickly reroute data became crucial for India's hundreds of outsourcing companies. Without such expertise, those companies would be unable to communicate with clients around the world.

"It's looking better," said R.S. Perhar, chief operations officer of Tulip IT Services, as the movie screen-size map indicated improving connectivity with flashes of green. "We are going to beat this because we had backup options. But it was a wake-up call."

The fiber-optic cables that carry data around the world have been damaged before. But experts said the simultaneous rupture of two underwater cables, reportedly caused by a ship's anchor 12 miles off the coast of Egypt, was rare, and served to highlight the vulnerability of the global information technology system.

Although India was hit particularly hard by the disruption in Internet service, countries in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia were also affected. Saudi Telecom issued a statement to local service providers explaining that the slowdown had been caused by problems "outside the kingdom." Zain Kuwait, a mobile telecommunications firm, received thousands of calls from customers complaining about slow Internet and BlackBerry service, according to chief executive Barrak al-Sabeeh.

The overall disruptions worldwide were limited because large businesses that use heavy bandwidth were able to use backup cables or other means of access, including satellite connections. Perhar, the Tulip executive, who is also secretary of the Internet Services Providers' Association of India, said all companies, large and small, should make sure they have options and lobby for more cables.

"Most of the larger companies know that you have to have multiple layers of the Internet to do business on the world stage. Indian companies have learned their lessons to have backups during past breakdowns," said Raja Varadarajan, executive vice president of Quatrro, a company that provides technical support to computer users in the United States. "We are talking about millions of dollars and jobs. What we want is to have such a good setup that the only way we find out there was a slowdown is by reading it in the papers the next day."

Other companies, meanwhile, may have learned the hard way. In addition to India's small outsourcing companies, travel and matrimonial sites and the country's railway ticketing system were affected by the cable snag.

The Hindustan Times was unable to carry stock pages because of technical problems. The newspaper ran a cartoon showing young call center workers sleeping at their desks with cobwebs growing over their computers.

"I'm just helpless without the Net, and this just shows you how the world can't live without it anymore," said Ravi Shekhar Pandey, a technology expert at Springboard Research, an IT market research firm in New Delhi. "The Internet has become like water."

Pandey said his neck ached and he was feeling crabby because his sluggish connection was preventing him from sending out a report. (The report, ironically, was on South Asia's strong software outsourcing market.) His wife was also annoyed, he said, because she couldn't access her favorite parenting Web sites.

By the end of the day Friday, Internet service here was back to about 80 percent of its regular speed.

At Tulip's offices -- where the logo reads: "Our clients swear by us. Not at us." -- Perhar was double-checking the company's fiber-optic connections. The three humming cases stuffed with wires seemed to be working. He took a deep breath.

Special correspondent Faiza Saleh Ambah in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, contributed to this report.