Middle East cables will be repaired by Sunday
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Flag Telecom expects that its&#160;two cables that were damaged in the Middle East&#160;last week will be repaired by Sunday, the company said in a bulletin on Thursday.Breaks last week in the Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable, owned by India&#8217;s Reliance Communications, and on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, owned by a consortium, disrupted Internet and other communications to the Middle East and India.Indian service providers were able to avoid a major crisis&#160;by diverting traffic from the Mediterranean routes to links in the Asia-Pacific region. Increased latency of traffic on account of the new routing however resulted in&#160;slower Internet access&#160;and poor quality of voice communications, according to the Internet Service Providers&#39; Association of India (ISPAI).Large Indian outsourcers, who depend on communications and the Internet for their business, said the impact on their business was marginal, as they already have enough of redundancy in their communications infrastructure. Smaller operations were however hit. Some call centers in India have privately reported frequent drops in calls from customers.Flag Telecom also reported last week that another submarine Internet cable owned by the company, called Falcon, had been cut Friday at a location 56 kilometers from Dubai, on a segment between the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman. This cable is also expected to be repaired Sunday, the company said.The damage to three cables in the area has sparked off speculation in blogs that there was sabotage. Flag Telecom said on Thursday that the break in the Falcon cable from UAE to Oman was because of an abandoned ship anchor, though it did not give a reason for the break in its Europe-Asia cable.The breaks in the Middle East have helped to emphasize the need for adequate backups to the existing links, particularly as premium traffic from India&#8217;s outsourcing industry travel through the Middle East cables, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the ISPAI.
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By Rowena Coetsee, Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  Sep. 20--Work on city streets that were wearing out abnormally fast because they contained a defective building material is expected to be finished by this time next year.
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Firms in the Middle East and South Asia face problems after undersea broadband cables were damaged.
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Parts of the International Space Station lost power for much of Sunday, but the three-member crew wasn't at risk and everything was fixed by Monday morning, officials said.
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For the past four years, Middle East peace could safely be filed under the same heading as Santa Claus: nice fantasy. But this Christmas, glimmers of hope have materialized in the Holy Land.
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Oops, were you guys using that? Vietnam telecom officials estimate it will take at least a month and cost over $5.84m to fix damaged undersea fiber-optic cables stolen by fishermen for salvage.â¦
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Internet traffic from India to countries like the U.S. and the U.K. has slowed down, as Internet service providers (ISPs) have started diverting traffic from Middle Eastern links to slower links through the Asia-Pacific region, according to the head of an ISP association in India.For reasons as yet unclear, two underwater cables in the Mediterranean Sea were damaged&#160;Wednesday, including one from Flag Telecom, owned by India&#39;s Reliance Communications, and another from the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) consortium.&quot;These links carry most of India&#39;s premium traffic to the Atlantic region, resulting in a disruption of about 50 to 60 percent of the bandwidth from India on Wednesday when the cables were first damaged,&quot; said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers&#39; Association of India (ISPAI), in an interview Thursday.Most of the traffic has now been routed through submarine cable links in the Asia-Pacific but traffic to the east coast of the U.S. and the U.K. will be slow, because of the longer latency involved by these diversions, Chharia said.Repairs to the Flag Telecom cable would take at least 10 to 15 days, which would mean that Indian companies, including outsourcing companies, will be affected for this period, Chharia said. A Reliance spokesman could not immediately provide an update on the status of the repairs, and other measures taken by Flag Telecom.India&#39;s second largest outsourcer, Infosys Technologies, said that its Internet service had not been affected by the outage in the Middle East. The company uses a lot of redundant links from a variety of service providers, a spokeswoman said Thursday.Another large Indian outsourcer, Satyam Computer Services, of Hyderabad, said that even as the links went down in the Middle East, the company automatically switched over voice and Internet traffic to networks from other service providers.A lot of Satyam&#39;s traffic that used to go through the Middle East links is now being routed through Singapore. &quot; We are seeing an increase in latency in MPLS (multiprotocol label switching) from 280 milliseconds to 310 milliseconds, and in Internet traffic from 300 to 350 milliseconds, which isn&#39;t a big problem,&quot; said Srinivasu C, head of network and systems at Satyam.The ISPAI recommends providing more backups on the Atlantic sector to ensure that the current problem does not get repeated in future, Chharia added.
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Flag Telecom's repair ship should reach and begin repairing the damaged undersea Internet cable on Tuesday.
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Text of report by Kenyan KTN TV on 7 September  The cabinet has today approved the sourcing of an under-sea fire- optic cable connection between Mombasa and Fujairah in the Gulf of Oman.
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HEBRON, Ky. -- Regional airline Comair will need several days to resume a full flight schedule after grounding them over the busy holiday weekend because of computer failure.
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SAFETY tests are to be carried out on the Forth Road Bridge after broken wires and corrosion were found inside its main cables. The weaknesses were discovered during the first full-scale inspection of the 40-year-old bridgeâs two main cables.
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Damage to undersea Internet cables hit business across the Middle East and South Asia on Thursday, including the vital call centre industry, prompting calls for people to limit their surfing.
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Shipping through Egypt&#39;s Suez Canal will resume today after a three-day halt caused by an oil tanker that ran aground halfway through it, shipping companies said.
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The following story contains the latest information known as of 23:30 CET on Monday, and will be updated as new information comes in.
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By Courtney Sherwood, The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.  Mar. 7--If you haven't downloaded the latest upgrades for your computer by this weekend, watch out when Monday rolls around.
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Construction began this week on the 4,500-kilometer East African Marine System (TEAMS) undersea fiber optic project that will link east Africa to the Middle East and the rest of the world, according to government officials.Alcatel-Lucent will construct the cable, which should be operational in next year&#39;s second quarter, for $82 million. The vendor won a tender for the project last year.The cable will provide affordable international broadband connectivity to several countries in east Africa, said Kenyan Minister of Information and Communication Samuel Paghisio. The cable, Paghisio said, will initially have a capacity of 40GB but will later be upgraded to 640GB.&quot;The cable will bring competition on the pricing of bandwidth, which means that the cost of communication in the region will come down,&quot; Paghisio said.The project is a joint venture between the Kenyan government and the United Arab Emirates government through Etisalat Telecommunication. The two governments own 20 percent shares each in the project. Eighty percent of project shares have been opened to the private sector.The cable will run from Mombasa in Kenya to a global network of fiber-optic cables at Fujairah, United Arab Emirates. The East African region includes Rwanda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia.Kenya is a member of the&#160;east African submarine cable system&#160;(EASSY), another submarine cable project that will run parallel to TEAMS project under the Indian Ocean from Durban, South Africa, to Port Sudan in Sudan and provide high speed Internet connectivity. The EASSY project will connect 21 countries in the eastern and southern Africa region to the rest of the world.
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By Greeley Tribune, Colo.  Jun. 2--Greeley road crews will be working to repair roads beaten up from last winter.   Raising manholes and water valves to level new pavement begins Monday on 20th Street from 35th to 47th avenues.