Times of India
Bangalore, Dec 28: The strong earthquake in Taiwan on Tuesday December 26 night that cut undersea cables, telephone lines and internet pipes, has put the BPO industry in India on a 'sporadic mode'.
A few crucial lines are completely down and therefore the call traffic is definitely hit. However, no significant outage (break in workflow) is reported yet, although it may happen later, said industry sources on Wednesday December 27.
Over 1,500 call centres and BPO firms in the country receive and make over 10 lakh overseas calls a day.
"Everything looks fine on the floor as of now. But the calls have been quite intermittent, lines are getting connected onand-off. Although, there is no major work loss reported yet, it's a matter of concern for us and our customers,"said facility head of a multinational BPO in Bangalore.
Another official in a city BPO said: "We have seven VSNL international lines and one of them is completely off."A call executive from a Gurgaon call centre said: "The call traffic must have been hit by 30% to 50% in some cases.
I myself get two dozens calls on any given day, but today I've received only six calls in my first hour.
"However, BPO firms like FirstSource and 24/7Customer said the rupturing of undersea cables has not impacted their workflow thanks to robust technology architecture and multiple bandwidth supply points.
"Our network design follows a mesh architecture with the use of diverse cable systems and service providers and our delivery centres are linked by a self-healing, interconnected redundant network with multiple intelligent points of presence. The connectivity design ensures that the system has a number of redundant paths, thereby allowing automatic routing of traffic on the best path,"said Sanjiv Dalal, chief technology officer, Firstsource.
"Our IT team is working closely with the service providers to ensure that our operations continue to function seamlessly,"said Pradeep Narayanan, chief delivery officer, 24/7Customer.
"No one actually wants to scare the customers, so let's wait for a day and see what the real impact is,"said facility head of a Chennai BPO.