Repair Ship to Start Work on Severed Undersea Cables Next Week

CAIRO (AP)--Work on damaged undersea fibre optic cables which have disrupted Internet services across the Middle East and India will begin when a repair ship gets there next week, a leading provider of international network services said Friday.

The UK-based FLAG Telecom said in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press that the ship was to arrive Tuesday on the location off the northern coast of Egypt in the Mediterranean Sea. The repair work will likely be completed in a week of the ship's arrival, it said.

Earlier Friday FLAG reported that a different undersea cable, also belonging to the company, was cut at a location 56 kilometers from Dubai, on a stretch between the United Arab Emirates and Oman in the Persian Gulf.

There were no other details on this damage - the first to be reported in the Persian Gulf.

But FLAG Telecom said a "repair ship has been notified and expected to arrive at the site in the next few days," apparently referring to the Persian Gulf location.

Earlier, the company said its FLAG Europe-Asia cable in the Mediterranean was cut early Wednesday morning, 8.3 kilometers from the Egyptian port of Alexandria, on a stretch linking Egypt to Italy. The company also said it was able to restore circuits to some customers and was switching to alternative routes for others.

It didn't say why the repair ship would take so long to arrive at a site so near the port of Alexandria. The harbor has been closed for most of this week because of bad weather.

Egypt's Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said Friday the Internet service in the country would be up and running to about 80% of its usual capacity within 48 hours, revising an earlier statement that this level would be restored by late Friday.

He told the Friday edition of the state Al-Ahram newspaper it would be more than 10 days before Internet services were fully restored.

Thursday, Kamil described the damage as an "earthquake" and said the reason behind the cut would only be determined after the repair teams with their robot equipment reach the damaged cables.

The official Middle East News Agency quoted the minister as saying technicians managed to raise the level of the Internet service Thursday to about 45% and Telecom Egypt would get soon a bandwidth of 10 gigabytes to be increased to 13 gigabytes - close to the country's total capacity of 16 gigabytes.

But Internet access remained sporadic or nonexistent Friday, the first day of the official Muslim weekend in the Middle East when all government offices and most businesses are closed.

Kamil, who said international telephone services haven't been affected by the incident, also praised the cooperation among the country's companies with the ministry to share the service and the cooperation of international companies in France, Italy and southeast Asia.

The paper also said Thursday the state Telecom Egypt communication company "sealed a deal" for a new 3,100 kilometer-long undersea cable between Egypt and France, also through the Mediterranean. That cable would take more than 18 months to complete, the report said. It didn't say who Telecom's partners in the deal were.

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

Posted to the site on 1st February 2008