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Third Internet Cable Breaks; IT Groups on Alert

Cable breaks today off the coast of Dubai, following two incidents affecting India earlier this week, and IT groups hold their breath. So far, offshore providers have weathered the crisis, even keeping up with real-time services such as call centers and network monitoring.

February 01, 2008 — CIO —

For the third time this week, a big internet pipe has had an underwater mishap: Today, it's a cable off the coast of Dubai, with officials offering no word on what caused the problem, according to CNN reports. For most enterprise IT groups, however, this series of Net traffic accidents has been more watch and wait than headache, so far.

When word spread on Thursday that bandwidth in India had been cut in half thanks to some sliced sub-Mediterranean cables on Wednesday, global IT leaders and their vendors quickly went about the work of mitigating the potential effects of the disruption. (For more on the situation, see Internet in India Slowed by Middle East Outage .)

"We were able to route traffic through Hong Kong," says Steve Bandrowszak, CIO of Nortel. As a result, the $11.42 billion telecom provider—which has a technology center of excellence in Bangalore, satellite operations in several other Indian cities, and outsourcing partnerships with Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, and Infosys—experienced no business disruption.

For most, it was a watching-and-waiting game. Bill Maguire, CIO of Virgin America, began monitoring the Burlingame, Calif.-based airline's traffic and performance the minute he heard about the problem Thursday morning, but saw no impact. John Stadick, director of IT at Sunbelt Rentals, a construction equipment rental company in Fort Mill, S.C., was also on alert. Sunbelt's parent company, Ashtead Group, is based in the U.K. and runs a private trans-Atlantic link to usher data traffic between the U.S. and London. When Stadick heard about the India problem, he had his network manager put automated traffic monitors on the Atlantic lines "just to be safe," he says. "We don't send a huge amount of traffic through it, but it's still a vital link back to our parent company."

"You really need to know more about the route your traffic goes over. I suspect a lot of companies (could have felt) it on the east coast. Their traffic flows that way because it is a shorter distance so response times are reduced," says Virgin America's Maguire. "You have to lean on your telco provider. They own the relationship with the companies that manage the ocean based lines."

Ultimately no major disruptions related to India's decreased bandwidth were reported as of Friday. "India has redundant connections to the rest of the world," says Dean Davison, vice president of marketing and research for offshore outsourcing consultancy neoIT. "Ten years ago, this would have been a big problem (for India). It was kind of like when Blackberry has an outage: all the Blackberry users are upset, but that was only a subset of the market. The countries that were impacted the most only have one major link to the rest of the world. I really don't think that it was much news for India, but it was a very big deal for the Middle East."