NEW DELHI: Changes in licensing provisions could be in the offing for international bandwidth providers.
The Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) is planning to send a representation to the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), seeking steps to prevent a Net breakdown as on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, two undersea cables connecting India and Western Europe, near Alexandria off the Coast of Egypt, had broken down after heavy storm and anchoring of a ship.
ISPAI president Rajesh Chharia told DNA Money on Friday, “We will request DoT to revise the licence service agreement for international bandwidth providers, so that they build in redundancy in their systems.”
The idea behind this is that every international bandwidth provider must have a back-up plan. Such a measure would prevent an internet breakdown- situation, he pointed out.
Although Net connectivity and surfing speed continued to be slow for the third consecutive day, service providers claimed that they had either restored links or had shifted to alternate paths, to a large extent. There are three upstream providers of bandwidth-Reliance’s FLAG, Bharti and VSNL.
While Egypt and the Gulf regions faced maximum disruption in internet services, users in India have been facing slowdown in connectivity and download speed.
The cut in bandwidth in India was estimated around 50-60%. Countries across the world, including India, had witnessed a similar breakdown of Internet services in December 2006, due to an earthquake in Taiwan. That time, it took almost two months to completely restore services.
Referring to the two incidents of undersea cable breakdown, an industry representative said, “Service providers of international bandwidth must take lessons from these.”
The industry had denied on Thursday that there would be any revenue impact on the companies because of the breakdown.
m_nivedita@dnaindia.net
