RSSSubmarine data routes in crisis
By Tim Conneally | Published February 1, 2008, 4:20 PM
Day two of the Eastern hemisphere's widespread Internet outage has seen an incremental worsening of the situation as another submarine cable is severed.
Today, another Flag Telecom cable, known as FALCON, was reported to have snapped, this time some 35 miles (56 km) off the coast of Dubai. FALCON was the first privately-owned multi-terabit cable to reach the west coast of India, celebrating its completion in 2005.
Initial reports early this morning from Reuters said that India's Internet capacity had climbed back to about 80% by diverting traffic to different routes. But there is no report now from the country's service providers yet as to how this third severance is affecting the flow of data.
The effects, however, are already showing here in the United States. Bank of America, for example,which has outsourced much of its back office work to India, posted a message today warning users of slowed traffic.
Many of the largest Fortune 100 corporations have huge amounts of back office work taking place in India. Global investment bank Goldman Sachs uses Indian outsourcing companies, Cisco houses its biggest research and development facility outside of the US in India, and brokerage firm Edward Jones outsources much of its IT work there. While they may not each suffer tremendously, the collective slowdown has the potential to impede many upcoming business exchanges.
Attempts by BetaNews to contact certain outsourcing groups in India, unsurprisingly, have been unsuccessful.
Flag Telecom reported to the BBC that two repair ships have been dispatched to the break sites, but will not arrive for several days, and repair is expected to take around a week.
Is that not the best quotation?
"Bank of America, [...]which has outsourced much of its back office work to India,[...]"
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|i don't understand how it would be very costly to have all these companies like computer support be local either it is because the U.S economy has always been bad or there just too much greed in the U.S to keep the jobs there
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|This is what you get when you cut every corner and your "help" is 10,000 miles away and it all depends on a fragile umbillical cord to work.
I love it.
Are these cables snapping from tectonic plate separation / movement or is it industrial espionage?
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|tectonic plate separation is possible, but 4 cables...on opposite sides the Arabic peninsula...that would be very unlikely. As for Industrial espionage, why 4 cables? I mean these cables are huge, we're talking STM-64 to STM-265 levels of traffic, which are huge amounts of data, of varying types.
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|Why the worries about outsourcing? I think the main question should be why and how did 4 cables break within a timespan of 48 hours.
One cable, sure that's bad luck, two would be extreme bad luck but four... that's weird.
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|This is only show how much modern economy depend on internet. 10years ago nobody even noticed this accident, today it making news even on BBC chanel.
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|It's about time that America realizes that outsourcing our workforce to another country doesn't help our economy one bit, it puts people like me out of work.
The money made up for putting the IT resources outside the country doesn't make up for the language barrier
I'm sorry, but I thought it was entirely ludicrous that I got a guy named "Steve" with such a thick cryptic accent I could barely understand him when I made a support call to the "server team" conveniently located in... you guessed it, India. The ONLY thing I understood well was his anglocized name!
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|I think its ludicrous that they make these people take on anglicized names. Like hello, do they think we are that dumb that we cant tell they are from India?
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|Hopefully this will make American companies rethink their IT outsourcing strategies. Of course, I'm not holding my breath on that, but one can hope.
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|American workers cannot compete with india, china etc because of cost of life. 300$ more than enough in mid india, but peanuts in states.
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|DK: some companies have, after receiving subpar results and/or customer backlash.
AS: this outsourcing to a cheaper country occurs in most countries & at most levels-- India itself has seen outsourcing to China & other countries.
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|Maybe we should bring some of those jobs back to the US?
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|HP Australia outsourced the support for HPC to SE Asia and after loosing a lot of clients, they moved it back!
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