ISPs stat rerouting; seek DoT's intervention- Internet -Infotech-The Economic Times

NEW DELHI & MUMBAI: Indian service providers (ISPs) such as Bharti, Tatas-owned VSNL and Reliance Communications, who offer international connectivity through global undersea links, have engaged in large scale re-routing of voice and data traffic, in addition to swinging to the backup mode following the disruption international connectivity due to the breakdown of two undersea cables in the Mediterranean region near Egypt.

The country’s other international bandwidth provider, BSNL, however, said that it services were unaffected as all its traffic is routed via Sri Lanka.

According to industry officials, Bharti had re-routed its network through i2i while the Tatas are diverting a significant chink of their traffic through the SMW-3 cable (which connects Asia to Europe) and the Tata Indicom cable.

Reliance, on the other hand, has already started restoring its services by routing its traffic on other partner networks. A Reliance official told ET that the company officials are in the process of securing necessary permissions for restoration work of the damaged cable to commence and the repair work start by early next week.

“The company is already restoring connectivity to its customers which had chosen its pre-planned restoration service, and is in the process of taking requests from those who haven’t,” the official added.

Despite the re-routing of internet traffic, consumers will have to bear with slow internet speeds for the next 10-15 days before services will be back to 100% normalcy. However, corporate customers, who are the prime revenue generators of service providers, have reasons to cheer, while most corporate links across India are back, 100% normalcy is expected from Friday.

Meanwhile, stand-alone internet service providers (ISPs) have demanded that the Department of Telecom (DoT) convey an immediate meeting with the three international bandwidth providers.

“We want the DoT to act whereby it mandates that Bharti, VSNL and Reliance have backup redundancy plans in place. Even earlier, in 2006, an earthquake in Taiwan had knocked out internet links to India for 20-25 minutes and affected Reliance Communications’ FLAG and VSNL’s SEA-ME-WE-3 under-sea cable systems. This is the second time that the country is facing major disruption. This can impact the confidence of international investors in India,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India.

Internet Service Providers Association of India Secretary RS Parhar says, “Traffic shipping by major service providers is expected to be complete by Friday evening, while the fibre repair itself would take another 15-20 days.” The country’s ISPs are connected to several lines and the downtime in one normally leads to deflection of traffic to other routes, he added.

When contacted on the issue, the VSNL spokesperson said that traffic had been restored to a large number of its customers. Sources also said that since VSNL had made large scale investments in restoration and protection work earlier, the company would complete its repair work at a quicker pace within the next couple of days.

Industry sources also said that Bharti had already restored the data and voice links to all its corporate and private leased line customers. However, its IP customers continue to be impacted, but there will be a significant improvement by midnight Thursday.

“Even as Bharti is getting additional capacity from other carrier, the company has also opened up bridge line and call centre scripts to help to help minimise customer impact,” industry sources added.