DUBAI, United Arab Emirates - An undersea cable carrying Internet traffic was severed in the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai, officials said Friday.
Officials said it was unclear what caused the damage to FLAG's Falcon cable about 50 kilometers off Dubai. The line is the third lost in three days.
Eric Schoonover, a senior analyst with TeleGeography, said the Falcon cable is designed on a "ring system" that takes it on a circuit around the Persian Gulf and enables traffic to be more easily routed around damage.
Ships that were dispatched Wednesday to repair two damaged undersea cables off Egypt are expected to reach the site Tuesday and finish repairs by Feb. 12, according to a news release from FLAG Telecom, which owns one of the cables.
The cables most likely were damaged by ships' anchors, said Stephan Beckert, an analyst with TeleGeography, a research company that consults on global Internet issues.
The Internet and phone traffic also has slowed down from Egypt to India due to the loss of two Mediterranean cables, FLAG Telecom's FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, a cable owned by a consortium of more than a dozen telecommunications companies.
Schoonover said the two cables damaged Wednesday account for as much as three-quarters of the international communications between Europe and the Middle East, so their loss had a much bigger effect.
Without use of the FLAG Europe-Asia cable and SeaMeWe-4, some carriers were forced to reroute their European traffic around the globe, which could cause delays, Beckert said.
Other carriers could use SeaMeWe-3, an older cable that remained the only direct connection from Europe to the Middle East and Asia. Because this cable is older, it has a smaller capacity than the two damaged cables, Beckert said.
Beckert stressed that although the problem created a "big pain" for many of carriers, it did not compare to the several months of disruption in East Asia in 2006 after an earthquake damaged seven undersea cables near Taiwan.
TeleGeography Research Director Alan Mauldin said new cables planned to link Europe with Egypt should provide enough backup to prevent most similar problems in the future.
Schoonover said a similar Internet problem could not happen in the United States because the content is located there, aside from the BBC. In addition, most traffic between the U.S., Canada and Mexico is carried over land, and there is a plentiful supply of undersea cables carrying traffic under the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
Internet service was slow Friday in Dubai and Egypt, where online service was intermittent. Service providers in Egypt said they hoped to have improved capacity by Sunday.
Most of the major Internet service providers in India, like Reliance and VSNL, were starting to use backup lines Friday, allowing service to slowly come back, said Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Services Providers Association of India.
Indian ISPs were still alerting customers to slowdowns over the next few days, with service-quality delays of 50 percent to 60 percent, Schoonover said.
Madhu Vohra, who lives in the city of Noida on the outskirts of Delhi, said she uses the Internet phone service Skype to call her son in the United States, but she hasn't been able to reach him since the slowdown.
"We keep trying for a long time, and the message comes up, 'This page can't display,' so finally we just turn the computer off and give up," Vohra said.
Internet cafes typically full of teenage gamers are nearly empty, with Internet speed still frustratingly slow.
"I felt like beating the ... modem, throwing it away, because we compete on the Internet and it feels really bad," said Aman Khurana, 13.
State-owned Dubai telecommunications provider Du and Kuwait's Ministry of Communications estimated Thursday that the problems might take two weeks to fix.
