Reliance completes repairs to the damaged under sea cable

Reliance Globalcom, the company that owns one of the cables that was damaged on 19 December has announced that it has completed repairs and normalised services.

''The cable ship crew completed the repair on the Flag Europe Asia (FEA) cable on 29th December 2008, at 14:15 GMT as scheduled.  Customer services that were affected due to the cable cut have been restored to normalcy with the completion of repairs,'' the company said in a statement.

Reliance Globalcom's IP customers had continued using the services without experiencing any outage, as its self-healing Global MPLS/IP backbone automatically diverted the IP traffic through the Pacific region. 

It had contracted a private repair ship to locate and repair the damage. 

Reliance Globalcom said that Italian cable ship, Teliri, was in the area to seek and repair the damaged cable using a remotely operated submarine.

The IP traffic had been automatically diverted via the Pacific region and customers continued to use the services. However, customers had faced some congestion and increased latency for European sites. 

The cable repair was expected to be completed during this week, subject to weather and cable and seabed conditions (See: TRAI seeks details about restoration from Reliance Communications)  

The voice services of Reliance Communications to all destinations are working smoothly without any loss of connectivity. Reliance Globalcom is working closely with its customers to ensure normalcy of services.

Breaks in three major submarine cable systems, the Sea Me We 4, Sea Me We3, and FLAG,  which link Europe, the Middle East and Asia, had disrupted internet and international telephone services in parts of the Middle East and South Asia. The Sea Me We cables are owned by France Telecom consortium and FLAG cable by Reliance Telecommunication.

Traffic from Europe to Asia, including India, had been interrupted to some extent. While this had considerably slowed down internet traffic in India, it has put much of the voice traffic out of services. India and the Middle East seemed to be most affected by the current cable cut.

Reliance Globalcom has further enhanced its IP backbone capacity by 5 Gbps on the eastern route to meet any future eventualities.

Repairs are underway for the other two cables owned by France Telecom.