Repairs to start on undersea cable Tuesday
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Flag Telecom will start repairs next week on a damaged submarine telecommunications cable linking Egypt and Italy. A repair ship is expected to reach the site of the damage, 8.3 kilometers from Alexandria, Egypt, on Tuesday. The repair will take a week to complete, Flag Telecom said Friday.Breaks on Wednesday in the Flag Telecom Europe-Asia cable, owned by India&#39;s Reliance Communications, and on the South East Asia-Middle East-West Europe 4 (SEA-ME-WE 4) cable, owned by a consortium,&#160;disrupted Internet and other communications to the Middle East and India.Flag said the Europe-Asia cable was cut at 8 a.m. GMT on Wednesday. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.A large number of customers in India were shifted by their service providers from the Middle East links to Asia-Pacific routes. But the new routing increased the time-lag heard on long-distance telephone calls, and also led to degradation of Internet service to the U.K. and the East coast of the U.S., said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers&#39; Association of India (ISPAI).Some analysts said that consumers and smaller customers were suffering even as providers tried to meet their service-level agreements (SLAs) with large corporate customers.The Indian government announced late Thursday that Indian service providers, including members of the SEA-ME-WE 4 consortium, are in constant touch with Telecom Egypt to ensure the speedy repair of the SEA-ME-WE 4 and Flag cables connecting India to Western Europe. Repairing this type of submarine optical fiber cable typically takes 15 days, but the Indian ministry of communications and information technology expects this link will be completely restored within 10 days.Another submarine Internet cable owned by Flag Telecom, the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman, was cut on Friday at 6 a.m. GMT, at a location 56 kilometers from Dubai, Flag said Friday. A repair ship has been notified, and is expected to arrive at the site of the damage in the next few days, the company said.
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Egypt had less than half its Internet  capacity available on Thursday because of breaks in two  undersea cables that have also affected the Gulf region and  south Asia.
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AT&amp;T Inc.'s push into cable TV is ramping back up after a pause prompted by glitches that the company says have been resolved with key network software upgrades.
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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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Huge swathes of the Middle East and Asia have been left without internet access after an undersea cable was damaged
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Commuters got their first glimpse Monday of what to expect for at least the next couple of months as investigators and construction crews work on identifying and repairing problems in the tunnels of the city&#039;s Big Dig highway system.
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The third cable, known as the Falcon cable, comes after breaks in two cables off the Mediterranean Sea coast on Wednesday.
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Upcoming DVR will offer CableCard and HDTV support.
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U.S. telephone carrier Verizon  Communications Inc. is set to sign an agreement as early as  Monday with five Asian telecoms companies to build the first  high-speed, transpacific undersea cable system directly linking  the United States and China, the Wall Street Journal reported  on its Web site on Monday.
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Two of the four undersea cables that provide data to much of the Middle East, Africa, and Asia which were severed late last week are now undergoing repair.
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Repairs to undersea cable connections that were cut off Egypt's northern coast last week, disrupting Internet access in the Gulf region and Southeast Asia, are expected to be completed this weekend.
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A breakdown in an international undersea  cable network disrupted Internet links to Egypt, India and Gulf  Arab countries on Wednesday, and Egypt said it could take  several days for its services to return to normal.
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By The Sun Herald, Biloxi, Miss.  Feb. 26--GULFPORT -- Mississippi Department of Transportation crews will be making repairs in the westbound lanes of Interstate 10 at the U.S. 49 interchange Tuesday night.   The work is expected to begin at 9 p.m.
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Day two of the Eastern hemisphere's widespread Internet outage has seen an incremental worsening of the situation as another submarine cable has been severed.
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After Internet disruptions and slowdowns engulfed a large swath of the Middle East and India, a new, more resilient cable is being laid in the Mediterranean Sea between Egypt and France, a spokesman for the cable-owner FLAG Telecom said Wednesday.
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By Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach  Feb. 17--Work scheduled on   Clyde Wells Bridge   FREEPORT -- Work crews for VMS will repair joints on the Clyde B. Wells Bridge on U.S.
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Firms in the Middle East and South Asia face problems after undersea broadband cables were damaged.