Egypt had less than half its Internet
capacity available on Thursday because of breaks in two
undersea cables that have also affected the Gulf region and
south Asia.
The connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast
on Wednesday, slowing or stopping Internet access for users
across parts of Asia, and forcing service providers to reroute
traffic.
Egyptian Telecommunications Minister Tarek Kamel said his
country's Internet capacity would reach 45 to 50 percent by the
end of the day.
"Capacity will be increased to 75 percent in 48 hours at
the most through alternative cables and satellites," he added,
at a signing ceremony for a new cable linking Egypt and France.
"Now nearly everyone is connected, but by different
degrees. Only call centers still have serious problems."
He said it would take at least a week to fix the breaches,
which are in segments of two intercontinental cables known as
SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG.
India, home to three companies that have stakes in the
cables, said in a statement: "It is expected that the links
will be completely restored by the ... operators within 10
days."
The International Cable Protection Committee, an
association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to
safeguarding submarine cables (http://www.iscpc.org/ ),
declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches.
"Investigations are still going on," a spokesman said.
Egypt said it did not know if weather had been a factor.
Storms forced Egypt to close the northern entrance to the Suez
Canal on Tuesday, making ships wait in the Mediterranean.
SUBMARINE NETWORK
The ICPC says more than 95 percent of transoceanic telecoms
and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest
by satellite. A single pair of optical fiber strands can now
carry digitized information equivalent to 150 million
simultaneous phone calls.
One of the biggest disruptions of modern telecoms systems
was in December 2006, when a magnitude 7.1 earthquake broke
nine submarine cables between Taiwan and the Philippines,
cutting connections between southeast Asia and the rest of the
world.
Internet links were thrown out in China, Hong Kong,
Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines, disrupting the
activities of banks, airlines and all kinds of email users.
Traffic was rerouted through other cables, but it took 49
days to restore full capacity.
While most cable operators say there is enough spare
capacity in the network, the ICPC has urged governments around
the world to be more aware of its strategic and economic
importance when deciding whether to issue permits for the
laying or repairing of cables in their waters.
In Cairo on Thursday, some residents said their Internet
connections were working at slow speed, while others still had
no workable access to the Web.
The digital blackout disrupted Egyptian financial market
operations on Wednesday. Gulf Arab countries and India also
reported significant disruptions to Internet connectivity.
Kamel said the $125 million submarine cable deal signed on
Thursday by state-controlled Telecom Egypt and France's
Alcatel-Lucent would boost network service in the most populous
Arab country.
India's Bharti Airtel and VSNL are among the partners in
the SEA-ME-WE-4 consortium, and Reliance Communications has a
share in the FLAG cable.