Redundancy saves BPOs

MUMBAI: The damaged undersea cables in the Mediterranean had little impact on the booming information technology industry in India, industry experts told DNA Money.

Two cables got damaged Wednesday by the anchor of a ship off the Alexandria cost in Egypt. It has severely impacted internet traffic in West Asia and countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. Since India has multiple cables landing on its shores, it has been able to minimize the impact.

Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) explained that half the 20 gigabits of data that flow through FLAG cabling system-one of the damaged cables— is down.

Business however has been not been impacted much.  “We have not been impacted because of because of in-built redundancy in our telecom infrastructure and bandwidth management by the operators.”

“The operators, besides shifting traffic to other cables, also dynamically manage the traffic to ensure that there is minimum disruption to international leased lines and MPLS customers,” said a Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) spokesperson. TCS is India’s largest software exporter.

Experts point out that there exists a traffic pecking order, where voice gets the highest priority, followed by international leased lines, and MPLS. Internet gets the least priority. Hence while most IT users are noticing slower internet connections, the leased lines connecting their development centres and client locations are working as usual.

“We use two routes - one via Atlantic and the other via the pacific. So even if one route is down, like it is now, we shift on the other. We have enough spare capacity -currently we use a third of our 45 MBPS capacity-to see that the redundancy line (industry term for back up) take care of our full business requirement,” Aegis Group Chief Executive Aparup Sengupta said. Aegis is the BPO arm of Essar group.

It could take up to two weeks for the damaged cable to be repaired. Till then Internet users would experience slower speed. Even though major cables have redundant connections, major damage can reduce bandwidth.

The India arm of one of UK’s largest customer management outsourcer, based in Pune says although the business is not affected, however, the level of redundancy is reduced. “As per service agreements, internet service providers are liable to provide alternate routes for the data traffic. Thus all that has happened is we are performing on reduced redundancy,” says the official.

With BPOs, the uptime is critical since most provide real time business support to their clients. Hence most use multiple service providers. Chennai-based BPO Lason India chief information officer M.S. Khannan explained that they use multiple ISPs (internet service providers) like Reliance Communications, Sify, and VSNL. “Hence business has not been impacted,” he said.

Similarly Sachin Jain, head IT of Gurgaon based BPO house eValueserve, says the business services in the company has not been hit as he had multiple service providers providing bandwidth for Internet connectivity.

V. Balakrishnan, head - IT, Polaris Software Lab said, “We use four links from operators and not all of them were down. So we were not effected. Our internet based VPN (virtual private network) was under performing, which we improved by removing some bad circuits. On IPCL or MPLS, there was no impact.”

However some BPOs had minor impact on their operations. Raman Roy, chairman of Quatrro BPO Solutions, an outsourcing company based in Gurgaon, said it was using backup lines via satellite.

“Business has been affected but the larger units — that forms 80% of the industry — have diverted their traffic. The remaining 20% has been affected,” he said.

“Because of slower net speed, we had to transfer some work to our Philippines centre. But as of today, connection is back to normal. The impact has been minimal,” Lokendra Tomar, senior vice president, Integreon Managed Solutions, a Mumbai-based legal process out sourcing company, said.