Financial Times

ISPs entice SLT clients as submarine link fails
By Akhry Ameer
Internet Service Providers (ISP) launched a major advertising spree promising uninterrupted services to grab a slice of Sri Lanka Telecom's business after its connections with the outside world were disrupted when a submarine cable link was damaged.

ISPs are trying to attract disgusted clients of SLT when its services failed after the SEA-ME-WE-III (South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe) undersea cable was damaged by a ship's anchor off Mount Lavinia last weekend.

A major part of SLT's telephony and all of its Internet and email connectivity to the world's telecommunication backbone is routed via this cable. The failure exposed the lack of contingency planning and a back-up at SLT, the island biggest telecom operator.

Although SLT said services were restored on Thursday, the failure caused losses to businesses depending on high speed, high capacity telecom connections such as software export companies and call-centres.

Not having sufficient backups, SLT rerouted its traffic on a prioritized basis to SEA-ME-WE-II, an older and lesser capacity cable thereby restoring international telephony and IPLC (International Private Leased Circuit) services to its clients.

Thereafter, by late Monday subscribers to the telecom operator's email had their connections restored. However, the larger segment of businesses using leased line connectivity that provides broadband access to the Internet backbone remained disconnected.

"Not all businesses are connected to SLT's email. Many of them have their email servers overseas; therefore leased lines are more crucial," said a head of a local business implying that SLT should have restored leased lines first.

Subscribers were also left in the dark initially not knowing when the services would be restored. Among those who suffered the most were software companies and business process outsourcing (BPO) companies or call-centres.

The software industry, represented by the Software Exporters Association, and some BPOs met with SLT's Chief Marketing Officer Kapila Chandrasena through a meeting facilitated by the Information Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) on Tuesday.

The representatives voiced their concerns at not being able to tell their clients when the services would be restored. The software exporters said they were unable to meet delivery targets for contracted work as the leased lines were the principal form of delivery channel where files are transferred electronically.

Devapriya Perera, General Manager of Astron, a longstanding BPO, said every hour of business disruption meant loss of clients and in turn loss of employment.

However, the BPO has had to depend on around seven other service providers to provide backup connectivity at a much higher cost. Allen Burton, the new Managing Director of HSBC Electronic Data Processing Lanka (Pvt) Ltd that was established recently to provide BPO services to HSBC's offices overseas, said they were not affected as the SLT link used by the company was not its primary channel. It has provided for contingencies.

SLT is the main provider of data services to local businesses through its SEA-ME-WE-III cable. Dialog recently became a provider of similar services after liberalization of telecom regulations. Dialog has a stake in the cable through its principal Telekom Malaysia with restorable capacity that means the operator is assured continuity of service through other cables within hours of a failure, a service advantage that could be passed on to its customers.

SLT said such an incident will not recur as it has decided to retain some of the extra emergency capacity that had been negotiated as a result of the damage.

SEA-ME-WEs and data services
The SEA-ME-WE is one of 20,000 undersea submarine cables laid between countries for telecommunication purposes. These may be laid by large companies that provide leased services or by consortiums of countries due to high cost of ownership. There are three SEA-ME-WE cables connecting South East Asia-Middle East-Western Europe. An agreement has been signed by a consortium of regional telecom operators for the fourth cable.

The cables are designed to send telecommunication signals which may be in the form of voice, data or video. Upon securing bandwidth from these cables, telecom operators may use it for normal telephony services or could even lease out services in the form Internet leased lines, Voice over IP (voice through Internet signals), pure voice, or IPLCs (International Private Leased Circuits) where a company leases secure dedicated bandwidth and has no restrictions on content.

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