Third incident of internet cable breakage

Another incident of Internet cable breakage has been reported with a cable Falcon, owned by Reliance Communications, India, going down around 56 kilometers (35 miles) from Dubai, between Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

This is the third such incident in a span of three days, with two earlier breaks, FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4 being noticed in internet traffic carrying cables deep under Mediterranean Sea. It resulted in a massive slow down of the internet in many parts of Asia and Africa.

It resulted in about 60% traffic slow down in web access in India and 80% in Egypt hitting various businesses and leading to huge losses for many firms. But this time India has not been affected much by the broken cables as the Falcon cable does not carry India-specific traffic.

The owner of the cable FLAG Telecom, a part of India's Reliance Communications has not yet confirmed the exact reason for the cable breakage. A repair ship has already been sent and is expected to arrive at the site within the few coming days.

The repair work is expected to be completed in almost 10 days. Following previous breaks, the internet traffic in India and other parts of Asia had already been re-routed to different routes.

The worst hit is the outsourcing industry and banking as they are totally dependent on the internet communication especially for the clients based in UK and US. It employs 700,000 people, serving clients mainly in the United States and Europe that sought to cut costs by getting the work done out of the country.

India's 11-billion-dollar outsourcing industry is made up of 1,250 firms that deliver services ranging from answering customer queries to processing credit card and mortgage applications.

Smaller Indian firms will be harder hit as they depend on a single service provider, said R.S Perhar, Secretary of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India (ISPAI) after the previous incident.

Even the common man has been affected by all this as internet has become an integral part of the lives of the people and it becomes really frustrating when someone is not able to do his work just because the internet service is down.

This Internet crisis has opened our eyes on what is the power of the modern Internet. It connects the whole world and has the potential of affecting businesses globally. The main problem is that it is still dependent on physical cables, which is against the common belief that it all depends on wireless and satellite.

Some extra measures need to be taken in order to escape such situations in future. These include having extra lines of cable and a well constructed plan that can provide backup facility to such immediate crisis.