Three submarine cables between Italy and Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea have been damaged, disrupting Internet and telephone communications between the Middle East and Europe, reports Bloomberg. The three cable systems carry more than 75 percent of traffic between the Middle East, Europe and America, according to the U.K.’s Interoute Plc, which operates a fiber- optic data network connecting 92 cities.
A fault is affecting the SMW4 cable (South East Asia–Middle East–Western Europe 4) near the Alexandria cable station, the FEA cable (FLAG Europe Asia) is down and the SMW3 cable system is also affected, according to information received from Telstra. Flag Telecom Group Ltd., a Reliance Globalcom unit, operates FLAG FEA and the other cables are owned by groups of phone companies across the regions.
The cables run from Alexandria in northern Egypt to Sicily in southern Italy. In January, an anchor severed the cables outside Alexandria after bad weather conditions forced ships to moor off the coast.
“The information we have is a bit sketchy, but chances are that it will have been an anchor again,” Jonathan Wright, Interoute’s director of wholesale products, said in a telephone interview. “Close to 90 percent of all the data traffic between Europe and the Middle East is carried on these three cable systems.”
Portugal Telecom, Portugal’s biggest phone company, has redirected traffic through other cables in the region and therefore the “impact is very small,” said a company official. Sonaecom, Portugal’s second-biggest fixed-line phone company, also said that is diverting traffic to other routes.
France Telecom’s Orange mobile-phone unit said the cable failure “greatly disturbed” the traffic between Europe and parts of Asia. At one point as much as 55 percent of voice traffic in Saudi Arabia, 52 percent in Egypt and 82 percent in India was out of service, according to Orange.
The Internet traffic “from Mumbai to London has now been re-routed via Hong Kong which may lead to congestion and increased latency on this route,” Reliance said in an e-mailed “traffic disruption update,” adding that it is working with the affected customers to restore all services.
Reliance Globalcom doesn’t know exactly what happened and engineers are working on the problem, said Anurag Joshi, head of the company’s global network operations center.
The SMW4 cable connects 12 countries: Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Italy and France.
France Telecom said one of its maintenance boats in the Mediterranean area will cast off tonight at 3:00 local time for a relief mission with 20 kilometers of spare cable on board.
Priority will be to recover the SEA-ME-WE 4 cable, then the SEA-ME-WE 3 cable, France Telecom said, adding that Sea Me We4 could be operating by Dec. 25 and that the situation should be back to normal by Dec. 31.
In February, internet services across India were disrupted for two weeks because of cuts in undersea cable network of Flag Telecom, a subsidiary of India’s Reliance Globalcom, off the northern coast of Egypt and UAE.
DailyWireless has more on AT&T: More Transpacific Cable, Google + SingTel = Unity Submarine Fiber, Fifth Submarine Cable Damaged, Forth Submarine Cable Damaged, Mediterranean Submarine Cables Cut and Fiber Crosses the Pond.
