Thumbnail:
Cuts to two subsea cables in the Mediterranean have severely disrupted internet and voice services in India and the Middle East.
Damage to the Flag Europe-Asia and the SeaMeWe-4 cables have left only the older SeaMeWe-3 system to provide service between Europe and the Middle East, research firm TeleGeography said.
The two cables, with 620 Gbps in capacity, are the prime direct links between Europe, the Middle East and south Asia.
Until service is restored, many carriers in Egypt and the Middle East must now route their European traffic around the globe, through South East Asia and across the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, TeleGeography said.
It is not clear what caused the cable breaks, which occurred on the morning of January 30.
The outages come just as a series of new Europe-Egypt cables are set to get off the drawing board, including Telecom Egypt's TE North cable, Orascom's MENA system, the IMEWE consortium cable, and a new cable by FLAG Telecom, said TeleGeography research director Alan Mauldin.
Source:
Robert Clark