South Asia Investor Review

Internet and telephone traffic between Europe and the Middle East and Asia has been seriously disrupted since Friday when three major underwater data lines were cut in the Mediterranean, according to media reports. The main damage is to the four submarine cables running across the Mediterranean and through the Suez Canal. The damaged cables include Sea Me We 4 and Sea Me We 3 lines, which connect countries between Singapore and France as well as the Flag FEA cable route, which stretches from the U.K. to Japan, a France Telecom spokeswoman told Network World . A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily. France Telecom isn't sure what caused the cut, she said. "We have two assumptions. The first is that it could be an underwater earthquake," she said. "Or it could be simply a ship in the area which has cut the cable." The BBC says that some seismic activity was reported near Malta, where the break apparently occurred, shortly before the c...

Internet services have been disrupted in parts of the Middle East after damage to an undersea cable in the Mediterranean. There was disruption to 70% of the nationwide network in Egypt, a government official told Reuters. There was also disruption in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, reported the Associated Press. India also suffered up to 60% disruption, a national industry body told Reuters news agency. Blogger Masud Reza from Pakistan is reporting that Pakistan is also affected by this outage. Mesud's post says: "At approx. 11:30am today, the SMW4 Segment 4 Sumbarine Cable went down due to a fiber cut between Marseille and Palermo due to which the Internet connectivity in Pakistan is severely affected. At this moment, TWA1 customers are suffering the most. PTCL has switched it's Internet traffic from SMW4 to SMW3. Let's hope that this fault is repaired soon since degraded Internet service cripples internet for business. Update: A ship has lef...