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The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, that country’s telecom services regulator, apparently wants to improve cooperation between the region’s capacity providers in the event of any future outage, such as the multiple cable failures that hit the Middle East and India earlier in February. Reliance Communications, which owns the Flag and Falcon cables damaged in separate incidents in February, claims other operators in the region, Bharti and Tata, essentially hindered Reliance in providing alternate routing for traffic disrupted on the Flag and Falcon cables by charging exorbitant rates.

So TRAI and the three carriers will try to hammer out some process for improving network resiliency in the region. Not all observers in the region agree with Reliance, however. Indian news provider Sify.com notes that all three providers sustained cable damage in February. The difference was that Tata and Bharti had better emergency restoration processes in place, some claim.

Reliance-owned cables were taken out of service but so was the SEA-Me-WE-4, partly owned by Bharti and Tata. In any event, TRAI wants to make sure a clear procedure exists for rerouting and capacity availability in the event such outages occur again in the future.

Given that virtually all major global carriers use capacity in the region supplied by Reliance, Tata or Bharti, it is inevitable that other retail carriers also were affected by the cable disruptions.

Renesys Internet Intelligence thinks Tata, SingTel and PCCW (News - Alert) benefited from additional traffic they picked up as alternate suppliers as a result of the cable damage.  Renesys believes SingTel, for example, picked up 200 or so customers as a result of the rerouting, while Level 3 Communications might have gained 100 or more customers. The share shifts depend on which underlying providers were carrying traffic for which other networks.

Renesys guesses that in addition to Flag, Sprint, Cable & Wireless, Deutsche Telekom, BT (News - Alert), AT&T and Verizon also lost some customers as a result of the outage.

“As for the providers who gained new traffic, AT&T, SingTel (News - Alert) and Level 3 initially picked up new networks from Bharti,” Renesys says. “However, all of them subsequently fell, perhaps due to another cable cut, with only Level 3 managing to preserve some of their gains.”

Meanwhile, Bharti and Tata are combining with seven other operators to build a new Europe-India cable—I-ME-WE. The 14,000km cable will originate in France, traverse the Middle East and land in India. Other partners include France Telecom (News - Alert), Etisalat of the UAE, Ogero (Lebanon), PTCL (Pakistan), STC (Saudi Arabia), Telecom Egypt and TIS Sparkle (Italy).

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Gary Kim (News - Alert) is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.