Cairo: A repair ship has arrived and begun work at the site of an Internet cable cut last week in the Persian Gulf, while a second vessel was expected to reach later the location north of Egypt where two other cables were cut just two days earlier, FLAG Telecom said.

The cuts have disrupted Internet services across a large swath of the Middle East and India, slowing down businesses and hampering personal Internet usage.

There has also been wide speculation that the cuts were caused by ships anchors, dragged along the bottom of the sea in stormy weather. But on Sunday, Egypt s telecommunication ministry said no ships were registered on or near the location when the first cut in the cables occurred, north of the Egyptian port of Alexandria.

The Egyptian statement further deepened the enigma on how the damage happened. Blogs have been filled with chatter that it was sabotage.

UK-based FLAG Telecom said that its ship with spare parts reached yesterday the fault location of the second cut, some 56 kilometres north of Dubai, between the Emirates and Oman, were the company's FALCON cable was damaged last Friday.

"The FLAG repair team is operating in extreme weather conditions to ensure timely repairs," the company said on its Web site.

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 December 2006. That repair operation also was hampered by bad weather.

Source : PTI