French crew begins repair of undersea cables

CAIRO, EGYPT: Two days after the undersea cables in the Mediterranean got severed, disrupting the Internet and phone communications in many parts of the world, efforts are still on to repair the cables and restore the communication network.

According to reports, a French crew has begun to repair the  cables that were severed on Friday.

The breaks were possibly caused by a ship's anchor, somewhere between Sicily and Tunisia.

Experts from France Telecom Marine are trying to locate the cables on the sea bed with the help of a robot submarine and bring them to the surface to be re-connected.

“We have to fix the cable fibre by fibre, and it's a very huge cable," said a  France Telecom Marine spokesperson.

According to Reuters, the three undersea communications cables breached in the Mediterranean on Friday are:

- SEA-ME-WE4 is 20,000 km long and links 14 countries. It runs from France through the Red Sea to India and then Singapore. (http://www.seamewe3.com)

- SEA-ME-WE3 is 40,000 km long and links 33 countries. It runs from northern Germany to Spain, the Red Sea, India and Southeast Asia, from where two branches extend as far as Australia and South Korea. (http://www.seamewe4.com)

- FLAG Europe Asia (FEA) is 27,000 km long and runs from Britain through the Red Sea to India, Southeast Asia and Japan. (http://www.flagtelecom.com/index.cfm?page=4023)

Country voice traffic lost (Per Cent)

Saudi Arabia (55), Djibouti (71), Egypt (66), United Arab Emirates (68), India (65),  Lebanon (21), Malaysia (44), Maldives (100), Pakistan (51), Qatar (73), Singapore (9), Syria (37), Taiwan (39), Yemen (38), Zambia (62).

While the cable breach has affected the international telephone calls it has also badly affected the BPO industry in many parts of the world, including India, which is suspected of having lost 65 per cent of all its related traffic.