According to Nishball, services to voice customers, private leased circuits across the Atlantic and private networks of corporates have been completely restored. "However, IT customers have been severely impacted. We have rerouted them to the Pacific route from the Atlantic route, so there is some congestion", he says.

However, Nishball says that customer experience should see a dramatic improvement over the next 24 hours owing to efforts to put up additional circuits on the cable network to increase the capacity of the highway to accommodate the additional traffic.

BPOs hit by cable crisis

Bangalore: The rupture of the international undersea cable has impacted the workflow and call-flow of IT and ITES firms across the country. Several firms have reported bandwidth declines upto 50%. The Internet Service Providers' Association of India estimated the bandwidth impact at 60%.

``Despite all our contingency arrangements, calls lacked quality and clarity as connections were bad with constant interruptions. E-mail based technical support services were the most hit, with systems moving snail-slow,'' said the IT manager of an MNC BPO firm in Bangalore.

Although not many companies were willing to talk about the actual impact, some call executives were open about it. ``US-based call-flow was impacted. Quality was very poor. E-mails did not land in time, neither could they be accessed as systems were constantly hanging,'' said an employee of Ocwen Financials.

Employees from across BPO firms like HSBC, IBM Daksh, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, Citi Global, Genpact, 24/7 Customer, Wipro BPO, Infosys BPO, HP and AOL, said the impact of the rupture was evident at work.

24/7 Customer said its operations were not impacted much as it was equipped with backup connections. TNN