NEW DELHI - In the heart of an industrial zone and up an ordinary flight of stairs, young computer engineers buzzed with activity yesterday in front of a huge screen tracking Internet connectivity in this country's booming service sector.
When Internet traffic slowed to a crawl late Wednesday after two cables were cut beneath the Mediterranean Sea, the ability of service providers such as this one to quickly reroute data became crucial for India's hundreds of outsourcing companies. Without such expertise, those companies would be unable to communicate with clients around the world.
"It's looking better," said R.S. Perhar, chief operations officer of Tulip IT Services, as the movie screen-size map indicated improving connectivity with flashes of green. "We are going to beat this because we had backup options. But it was a wake-up call."
The fiber-optic cables that carry data around the world have been damaged before. But analysts said the simultaneous rupture of two underwater cables, reportedly caused by a ship's anchor 12 miles off the coast of Egypt, was rare, and served to highlight the vulnerability of the global information technology system.
Although India was hit particularly hard by the disruption, countries in the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia were also affected.
The overall disruptions worldwide were limited because large businesses that use heavy bandwidth were able to use backup cables or other means of access, including satellite connections. Perhar, the Tulip executive, who is also secretary of the Internet Services Providers' Association of India, said all companies, large and small, should make sure they have options and lobby for more cables.
