When news broke Jan. 31 that an undersea fiber-optic cable owned by India’s Reliance Communications had been accidentally sliced by a ship’s anchor in Egypt, people feared a possible replay of 2006. That’s when an earthquake in Taiwan disrupted Internet traffic in East Asia for nearly two weeks. India, where the Internet is the lifeblood of the outsourcing industry, was considered particularly vulnerable.
Happily for Reliance [which did not respond to phone calls], and for Indian outsourcing giants Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, Wipro, and Satyam Computer Services, which use such undersea fiber-optic cables, no serious problems occurred. Neither, it appears, have the global operations of multinational tech players like IBM skipped a beat. True, some of India’s Internet cafes saw connection speeds slow dramatically, so the time needed to connect to Google increased 60 times — from two seconds to two minutes — but overall the economic impact of the accident has proven minimal for India.
It could have been much, much worse. According to the Internet Service Providers Assn. of India, nearly half of the 25 gigabits of bandwidth India uses relies on cables, of which 60 percent snake under the Atlantic Ocean. The rest is routed through the Pacific.
Internet Traffic Priority System
Instead, the disruptions gave India’s outsourcers the opportunity to prove to their clients how well they’re prepared for such emergencies. As soon as the problem with the Reliance cable became known, traffic was rerouted through the alternative network of cables running under the Pacific Ocean. “There are redundancies built into the system. There are multiple pipes, so if one breaks, others work,” says Pradipta Bagchi, a spokesman for Tata Consultancy Services.
Bagchi explains the pecking order for Internet traffic priority. Top of the heap is voice — so that calls to Aunt Mathilda in Missouri or cousin Vijay in Bangalore…