CAIRO, EGYPT - EGYPT had less than half its Internet capacity available on Thursday because of breaks in two undersea cables that have also affected the Gulf region and south Asia.

The connections were disrupted off Egypt's northern coast on Wednesday, slowing or stopping Internet access for users across parts of Asia, and forcing service providers to reroute traffic.

Egyptian Telecommunications Minister Tarek Kamel said his country's Internet capacity would reach 45 to 50 per cent by the end of the day.

'Capacity will be increased to 75 per cent in 48 hours at the most through alternative cables and satellites,' he added, at a signing ceremony for a new cable linking Egypt and France.

'Now nearly everyone is connected, but by different degrees. Only call centres still have serious problems.'

He said it would take at least a week to fix the breaches, which are in segments of two intercontinental cables.

India, home to three companies that have stakes in the cables, said in a statement: 'It is expected that the links will be completely restored by the ... operators within 10 days.'

United States phone companies Verizon Communications and AT&T both use the affected cables. Neither gave an estimate of the financial impact of the outage, if any.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its networks were already back to normal as it had rerouted traffic. Verizon said it expected service to be restored for all its customers in a matter of days.

'We do still have some latency and congestion. We're purchasing additional capacity,' said Verizon spokesman Linda Laughlin. She said new network capacity, used to reroute traffic, can sometimes take some days to switch on.

'When there's additional capacity, the latency will be better and the congestion will come down,' she said. 'Many of our customers are already back up, operating normally.'

The International Cable Protection Committee, an association of 86 submarine cable operators dedicated to safeguarding submarine cables ( http: www.iscpc.org/ ), declined to speculate on the cause of the breaches.

'Investigations are still going on,' a spokesman said.

Egypt said it did not know if weather had been a factor.

Storms forced Egypt to close the northern entrance to the Suez Canal on Tuesday, making ships wait in the Mediterranean.

The ICPC says more than 95 per cent of transoceanic telecoms and data traffic are carried by submarine cables, and the rest by satellite. A single pair of optical fibre strands can now carry digitised information equivalent to 150 million simultaneous phone calls. -- REUTERS