A repair ship is expected to arrive next week to the site of severed cables off the northern coast of Egypt to begin repair work on the damage that has disrupted Internet services across the Middle East and India, a leading provider of international network services said Friday.
The U.K-based FLAG Telecom said in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press that the ship was to arrive Tuesday on the location in the Mediterranean Sea. The repair work will likely be completed in a week of the ship’s arrival, it said.
In a separate statement, FLAG Telecom reported that a different undersea Internet cable, FALCON, also belonging to the company, had been cut Friday at 0559 GMT at a location 56 kilometers (34.8 miles) from Dubai, on a stretch between the United Arab Emirates and Oman in the Persian Gulf.
There were no other details on this damage — the first to be reported in the Persian Gulf.
But FLAG Telecom said that a “repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days,” apparently referring to the Persian Gulf location.
Earlier, the company said its FLAG Europe-Asia cable in the Mediterranean was cut Wednesday morning, 8.3 kilometers (5 miles) from the Egyptian port of Alexandria, on a stretch linking Egypt to Italy. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.
It did not provide any details as to why it would take until Tuesday for the repair ship to arrive at a site so near the port of Alexandria. The harbor has been closed for most of this week because of bad weather.
Wednesday’s damage to two undersea Internet cables off Egypt’s coast disrupted Web access across a wide swath of Asia and the Middle East.
Egypt’s…