Wednesday, Feb 06, 2008
(This story was originally published on Tuesday.)
DUBAI (Zawya Dow Jones)--Egyptian government officials and engineers from FLAG Telecom arrived Tuesday at two of four sites where undersea cables were severed last week, a FLAG spokesman said.
"Our ships arrived at the FLAG Europe-Asia and FALCON sites in the morning," the FLAG Telecom spokesman, who declined to be named, told Zawya Dow Jones.
A team of 30, including a naval officer, telecom engineers, project managers and Egyptian government officials, arrived on a repair ship at the FLAG Europe-Asia site.
FLAG Europe-Asia and SEA-ME-WE 4 are near Alexandria, Egypt, DOHA-HALOUL cable is near Qatar and FLAG's FALCON cable is between Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
The four optic-fiber submarine cables, severed since Jan. 30, carried more than 75% of telecommunication traffic between the Middle East and Europe. The disruption has affected more than 85 million Internet and phone users in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and the U.A.E. Businesses bore the brunt of the telecom outages and many reported lost earnings because of the cuts.
"The Egyptian authorities are doing an investigation and they will be submitting a report of their findings to telecoms companies," the spokesman said. He added that FLAG, which is a subsidiary of India's no.2 telecom Reliance Communications, was still not ruling out bad weather as the cause of the cuts.
Egypt's Ministry of Transport said in a statement Monday it ruled out the damage to the cables was caused by ships dragging their anchors as footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the cable locations showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged.
"The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships," the statement said.
FLAG said it was surprised by the findings in the statement.
"Most of our previous cuts were due to ships dragging their anchors - we really don't know how to react to what the Egyptian government said so far," the FLAG spokesman said.
"We are not ruling out bad weather - we are waiting for our team of experts on the repair ship to give us the details of their findings," he said.
The repairs are expected to take up to two weeks at the FLAG Europe-Asia site and 10 days at FALCON.
-By Tahani Karrar, Dow Jones Newswires, +9714 364 4965 Tahani.Karrar@dowjones.com
Copyright (c) 2008 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
06-02-08 0429GMT
