The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has been moved by the Telecom and Internet major Reliance Communications by alleging that the rival Bharti Airtel is not offering access to its Chennai submarine cable landing station.

The importance has been gained by the move as three sub-sea cable systems on the trans-Atlantic route were severed on 19th December, and the traffic was being re-routed by the telecom companies via the trans-Pacific leg. Bharti Airtel lands two cables - consortium cable SEA-ME-WE-4 (SMW-4) and own cable i2i - at its landing station in Chennai.

RCom has specified in a letter to the telecom regulator today that it had also requested Bharti to grant immediate access to its Chennai cable landing station in order to improve availability of the bandwidth to customers in India.

The letter said, "We filed the requisite application and have also made the payment. We have requested Bharti to expedite the access to 2 STM-16 capacity on SMW-4, however, we have not got the access yet."

It also added, "An STM-16 is standard of bandwidth traffic over optical fibre cables. The international carriers in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan and the US have co-operated and completed the work, but for the one cross connect at Bharti, which is holding the capacity availability."

"There has been a fibre cut on SMW-4 and other major submarine cables near Palermo in Italy, affecting the overall traffic between India and Europe. Bharti Airtel is taking all necessary steps for restoration of services and is currently routing traffic on alternative routes such as its i2i undersea cable. This cable is currently being used to meet our own requirement as well as the requirements of other impacted operators," said Bharti Airtel spokesperson.

"We are working overtime to ensure the requests for additional bandwidths are addressed as soon as equipment to enhance capacity is available with us. We received request from Reliance Communications only yesterday and are trying our best to resolve their problem in the current situation as soon as possible," he added.