India Internet capacity at 80 pct after cables break

BANGALORE (Reuters) - India's Internet services were operating at about 80 percent of capacity on Friday after breaks in undersea cables disrupted Web access, and normal services could be restored in a week, an industry official said.

The underseas cable connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, affecting Internet access in the Gulf region and south Asia, and forcing service providers to reroute traffic.

India's booming outsourcing industry, which provides a range of back-office services like insurance claims processing and customer support to overseas clients over the Internet, played down the disruption, saying it had back-up plans in place.

Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, said service providers were diverting Internet traffic to ensure there was no disruption in services.

"I would say 70 to 80 percent of the Internet services are operating normally now. It will take about a week to bring the services back to normal," Chharia said.

"Though we will continue to see some latency, there won't be any chocking in Internet access that we saw in the last couple of days."

He said cable repair ships had already been SENT to fix the breaches, which are in segments of two intercontinental cables known as SEA-ME-WE-4 and FLAG.

A spokesman for FLAG in Mumbai has declined comment on the state of restoration of operations but Punit Garg, chief executive officer of FLAG Telecom, said on Thursday the cable breaks would not cause any revenue loss to the company.

"Where the cable cut has happened, we are building a new cable over there, which is the FLAG Mediterranean cable, which will connect Egypt to France," Garg told an investor conference call.