More Mercury Madness
Feb 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 am by Susie
I wonder if this will, you know, cause any American companies to rethink their outsourcing practices:
BANGALORE, India (AFP) — India’s vital outsourcing industry was grappling with major communications disruption Thursday after damage to undersea cables thousands of kilometres away in the Mediterranean.
Internet connections may take days to return to normal, businesses said, adding that telecommunications in neighbouring Bangladesh and Sri Lanka were also affected.
“Information-technology companies, software companies and call centres that provide online services to the UK or the US East Coast are the worst affected,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers’ Association of India.
“Some of them are re-routing through the Pacific as a backup, but the voice quality and speed of traffic will be highly degraded,” he said, adding this solution left operators with half their normal bandwidth.
Egyptian officials said Wednesday that an undersea fibre optic communications cable had been cut, while in Kuwait the government said “weather conditions and maritime traffic” had damaged two cables, affecting most of the region.
It was unclear when the connections between Europe and the Middle East — and South Asia — would be repaired, although the worst estimates predicted disruption for up to 15 days.
Hmmm, mercury or sabotage. Several cables failing at once is quite a coincidence.
(raised eyebrow) There is talk on the Internets about a shift in the sea bed.
… Lighting Fuses with a third undersea cable cut, the Internet in the Middle East has been effectively eliminated, According to CNN that cable outage does not extend to Israel, Lebanon and Iraq. Is it a coincidence that these three countries were spared in the communications blackout that is affecting the rest of the Middle East?
No such thing as coincidence. One cable I’ll buy; two, maybe… over forty-eight hours. Three, in twenty-four? Nope. [and I don’t think Mercury has anything to do with it either] tb
Mercury retro does not preclude sabotage. It merely fosters the effect of distorting or breaking communication.