India's loss of up to half of its internet bandwidth, traced to the severing of an undersea cable on 30 January, has highlighted one of the least studied but potentially most serious risks raised by offshore outsourcing to English-speaking emerging economies. India has attracted a high volume of back-office work, and an increasing flow of value-added data processing for Europe and America, on the strength of its increasingly congenial business environment and stable political backdrop. But its technological infrastructure remains fragile, even between major urban centres. Two days into the present disruption, there is no clear indication of when normal service will be resumed.
Damage to the cable linking Italy and Egypt has also affected internet traffic there and in Saudi Arabia, with many business and household users reporting they cannot log on and others suffering severely restricted speeds. Egypt has reported a 70% loss of service. True to the internets original intention, the system has not gone down completely, as data can continue to flow in both directions through other parts of the network. But for the Indian subcontinent and Middle East, the alternative routes are still sparse, with land- and satellite-based links unable to handle all the diverted traffic.
While the internet within the European, American and Japanese economic blocs is supported by thousands of alternative links and servers, connections between them are fewer in number, and mostly dependent on undersea cables. Even when traffic to India is flowing freely through the sub-Mediterranean cable (part of the worlds longest, at over 24,000 miles), its onward transmission is reportedly handled by just 13 servers.
Big BPO providers promise rescue by redundancy
Large western businesses with outsourced operations have invested heavily in their own high-speed cabling, and are the least likely to be affected by a general internet blackout. Infosys, Insias second largest business process offshoring (BPO) provider, today reported no damage to its service, because of the large redundancy built into its system. Other providers have confirmed that they are running successfully through alternative links, via centres like Singapore linked to Europe and America by alternative cables.
But the president of India's Internet Service Providers' Association has said that the broken links carry "most of Indias premium traffic to the Atlantic region," implying that some UK businesses may experience a disruption of traffic to their call centres in the region. For those that depend on overnight processing of data in India, or the handling of internet queries by contact centres there, even a slowdown in the transmission speed can have potentially serious effects.
The telecoms companies operating the cable also have automatic systems in place to divert traffic through other routes, and repeat the assurance that there is plenty of spare capacity to deal with emergencies like this. But they also admit that, if traffic on the undersea cables gets too congested, they give priority to voice calls (which now carry higher margins) over internet transmission. And spare capacity is forecast to drop sharply in the next few years as bandwidth-heavy activities like high-definition television and file-sharing pick up and go global. Britain's commitment to be the most wired EU nation by 2020 has been applauded by its data-based businesses, but will not solve their problems unless the same attention is paid to the continent's external links.