Repairs of undersea cables underway in the Mediterranean

Repairs began yesterday on the undersea cables in the Mediterranean, which were severed last week, disrupting telephone and internet communications in many parts of Asia, and the Middle East.

France Telecom yesterday said  that it had sent a maintenance cable ship, Raymond Croze, from its marine division in southern France, with 64 crew on board and an underwater robot to locate the damage, said to have occurred somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia.

The underwater robot, Hector, will be sent down in the Mediterranean, to locate the damaged cable and lift it to the deck of the ship, where engineers will re-connect the massive fibre optic cable, fibre by fibre.

Breaks in three major submarine cable systems which link Europe, the Middle East and Asia - the Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We3 - is owned by a consortium of phone companies, including VSNL, Bharti Airtel and the Paris-based telecommunications giant-France Telecom. (See: Internet, telephone services disrupted by break in undersea cable)

SEA-ME-WE4, which links 14 countries, is 20,000km long undersea cable and runs from France through the Red Sea to India and ends in Singapore while the SEA-ME-WE3 links 33 countries is 40,000km long and runs from northern Germany to Spain, the Red Sea, India and Southeast Asia, from where two more branches go to Australia and South Korea.

The third cable, Flag is owned by Anil Ambani-led Reliance Globalcom, is 27,000 km long and runs from Britain through the Red Sea to India, Southeast Asia and Japan.

The damage on Friday to the SEA-ME-WE3, SEA-ME-WE4 and FLAG cables has disrupted communications to varying degrees from Zambia to India and Taiwan.

It is still not established as to how the cables had been damaged, but France Telecom engineers suspect that a ships anchor could have dragged the cable many kilometers from its actual site and said the repair to the SEA-ME-WE4 cable could be concluded by 25 December while the SEA-ME-WE3 by the end of the year.

The Flag cable, damaged by the same incident and operated by Reliance Globalcom is also being repaired, by the company sending a ship with spares to the Mediterranean.

Telecommunication providers in the Middle East rerouted their voice and data traffic through Asia and North America during the weekend with the Egyptian government saying that more than 80 per cent of its Internet capacity had been restored while Yemen and Jordan reported connection speeds had slowed down.

In India, Internet users will experience very slow speeds as 82 per cent of its internet traffic is disrupted and the IT and BPO companies will be hit although the bigger players have access to alternative access Pacific route for internet and voice traffic.