Over the past few years many residential and business customers have made the switch from traditional to VoIP telephone service. It’s been common for a few years for large companies to outsource some of their customer service functions overseas, especially, to India, using VoIP technology to route callers. Today, a failure in an undersea cable in the Mediterranean Sea exposed one of VoIP biggest problems. The cable failure cut or severely limited Internet access to millions of homes and business across the Middle East and India. Egypt's Telecommunications Ministry said the cable was cut, disrupting 70 percent of the country's Internet network.
India said it had lost more than half of its capacity. "There has been a 50 to 60 percent cut in bandwidth," Rajesh Chharia, president of the Internet Service Providers' Association of India, told Reuters. Chhaira hopes that a "degraded" service would be activated by Wednesday night, but full restoration will take 10 to 15 days.
Chharia said some of India's many outsourcing businesses had been affected.
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