NEW DELHI - Bandwidth providers said they expected India's Internet service to be back to about 80 per cent of its usual speed by the end of Friday, a day after Internet service across a swath of Asia and the Middle East was disrupted.
In Egypt, meanwhile, Minister of Communications and Information Technology Tarek Kamil said service would be up to about 80 per cent of its usual capacity within 48 hours.
Two cables that carry Internet traffic deep under the Mediterranean Sea snapped Wednesday just as the working day was ending in India, so the full impact was not apparent until Thursday.
India took one of the biggest hits, and the damage from its slowdowns and outages rippled to some U.S. and European companies that rely on its lucrative outsourcing industry to handle customer service calls and other operations.
The situation improved Friday as international bandwidth providers shifted their Internet traffic to cables under the Pacific Ocean, said Rajesh Chharia, president of India's Internet Service Provider's Association.
Many companies said their Internet access already had gotten better.
"We've been getting and sending e-mails normally. Compared to yesterday connectivity is certainly improved," said Praveen Mathur of Streit India Advisory Services Pvt. Ltd., an investment consulting firm based in New Delhi that has clients in the United States and Canada.
But Internet access remained sporadic or nonexistent Friday in Egypt, the first day of the official Muslim weekend in the Middle East when all government offices and most businesses are closed.
The cables, which lie undersea north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria, snapped Wednesday.
Workers will not know for sure what caused the cuts until they are able to get repair ships and divers to the area, though there was speculation a ship's anchor was to blame.
A repair ship is expected to arrive next week to the site of severed cables off the northern coast of Egypt to begin repair work, a leading provider of international network services said Friday.
The U.K.-based FLAG Telecom said in an e-mail sent to The Associated Press that the ship was to arrive Tuesday in the Mediterranean Sea. The repair work will likely be completed in a week of the ship's arrival, it said.
It did not provide any details as to why it would take until Tuesday for the repair ship to arrive at a site so near the port of Alexandria. The harbor has been closed for most of this week because of bad weather.
In a separate statement, FLAG Telecom reported that a different undersea Internet cable, FALCON, also belonging to the company, had been cut Friday at 0559 GMT at a location about 35 miles from Dubai, on a stretch between the United Arab Emirates and Oman in the Persian Gulf.
There were no other details on the damage -- the first to be reported in the Persian Gulf.
The Internet disruption has raised questions about the system's vulnerability. A Gulf analyst called it a "wake-up call," while one in London cautioned that no one, including the West, was immune to such disruptions.
They could have a "massive impact on businesses," said Alex Burmaster from Nielsen Online in London, adding that ordinary people "probably couldn't imagine" life without the Internet.
Such large-scale disruptions are rare but not unknown. East Asia suffered nearly two months of outages and slow service after an earthquake damaged undersea cables near Taiwan in 2006.
