Internet connectivity in India likely to stay affected for two weeks: Report

Internet connectivity is likely to stay affected for the next two weeks in India as three undersea cables have suffered multilple cuts, according to a report by Livemint. The report quotes a Bharti Airtel spokesperson who informed that there have been multiple fibre cuts on SMW4, IMEWE and EIG cable systems, disrupting communication traffic between India and Europe. The spokesperson added that Bharti Airtel was working with the cable consortium for restoring services and that data traffic would be routed on alternate routes, while voice traffic had been already normalised.

It also quotes a Tata Communications spokesperson who confirmed that the SMW4 cable system suffered a cut but mentioned that the company has taken other measures to reroute customers minimising service disruption and that the restoration of the cable is under way. Bharti Airtel is part of the consortium that manages all the three cables while Tata Communications looks after SMW4 and IMEWE cables.

The SMW4(South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4) cable connects Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Egypt, Italy, Tunisia, Algeria and France, while the IMEWE (India-Middle East-Western Europe) cable goes through Mumbai, Karachi, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Italy and France.The EIG(Europe India Gateway) connects Portugal, Gibraltar, Monaco, France, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Oman and the UAE.

The Livemint report also clarifies that services offered by Reliance Communications and BSNL have not been affected.

As we reported earlier the Internet has been majorly affected since the last two days with cable cuts, outages and a cyber war going on between two Internet companies.

While the cause of the cuts is still not clear reports indicate that three divers were caught by Egypt's coastguard trying to cut through an undersea Internet cable.

One of the other major reasons for the slowdown was a tiff between Spamhaus, a group fighting spam and Cyberbunker, a Dutch company that hosts Web sites said to be sending spam that led to one of the largest computer attacks on the Internet, causing widespread congestion and jamming crucial infrastructure around the world.