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Bandwidth capacity suffered 30% degradation

NetScribes/Mahesh Shetty

Initial estimates of the impact of bandwidth provider Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited's cable snapping at Dubai is that services suffered a 30 per cent degradation.

The company, which is the leading Internet service provider in India, saw its bandwidth capacity diminish drastically after a part of its undersea cable routing international Internet traffic snapped near Dubai.

The SEA-ME-WE 3 cable that snapped on Monday provides 620 mbps out of VSNL's total bandwidth of 1 gbps.

The company's other undersea cable FLAG contributes another 45 mbps with the remaining capacity coming from satellite ISPs.

While industry sources believe the service loss was to the extent of 60 per cent VSNL states that the figure is much lower.

"I believe there has been a 30 per cent degradation in services," said Amitabh Kumar, director (operations). "Most of the traffic was rerouted through our FLAG cable and we have resumed operations on the SEA-ME-WE line as of today," he added.

"This problem certainly didn't happen at VSNL's end. It's a problem with SEA-ME-WE 3 and service providers in other parts of the world would also have suffered," said a source at a leading hosting services company.

Asked what the response would be in case an incident like this repeats itself, he said FLAG would still be the solution, as the company could not possibly put up another line dedicated for emergency backup.

He believes other than ISPs like Satyam and Dishnet who use the VSNL backbone for their services, corporate and individual users would similarly have suffered a 30 per cent degradation in service.

The snag had hit Internet access across the country and most users complained of extremely slow speeds up to early Wednesday morning.

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