Damaged undersea cables of Egypt, UAE, repaired

New Delhi, Feb 10 (UNI) Services on two of the three broken undersea cables, which provide Internet services to parts of West Asia and Asia, have been restored after repairs.

''The breaks in the FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) and FALCON cable have been repaired and services routed back through these cables,'' said a FLAG Telecom statement.

FLAG Telecom is a Reliance Communications subsidiary.

Web access in south Asia and parts of West Asia was disrupted after breaks occurred in segments of two cables of Egypt's northern coast nearly two weeks ago, forcing service providers to re-route traffic.

This was followed by a breach in the FALCON cable between Dubai and Oman.

''The customer circuits have been normalised on the FEA and the Falcon that were earlier restored on alternate routes due to cable cut last week,'' the statement said.

Repair work on SEA-ME-WE 4, the second cable cut near Egypt, is also expected to be completed today.

More than 95 per cent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite.

One of the biggest disruptions of telecommunication systems was in December 2006, when a magnitude of 7.1 earthquake broke nine submarine cables between Taiwan and the Philippines, cutting connections between south east Asia and the rest of the world.

Internet links were disrupted in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines. Though traffic was rerouted through other cables, it was after 49 days that full capacity was restored.

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