Asia's wired world snarled as quakes snap telecom cable
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  Asia's wired world snarled as quakes snap telecom cable
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« on: December 28, 2006, 04:46:43 PM »

Asia's wired world snarled as quakes snap telecom cable

 
By Vincent Yu, AP 
Business is poor at this Hong Kong Internet cafe Thursday as Internet connections remain slow or non-existent in parts of Asia.
 

By Paul Wiseman and Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY
HONG KONG — Asia slowly began to recover Thursday from a cyber-tsunami that for nearly two days has disrupted international phone service, cut access to the Internet, slowed e-mail traffic to a crawl and given office workers enough downtime to contemplate the dark side of living in a wired world.
"We depend on the Internet" and international phone service, says Edmund Wong, 26, sales administrator for a Hong Kong property firm. "Without them, we can't do anything."

While phone service began to return to normal, a full telecom recovery could take weeks, says Duncan Clark, chairman of BDA, a Beijing-based telecommunications consultancy.

The trouble started Tuesday night when a series of earthquakes beneath the seas off southeastern Taiwan snapped underwater cables connecting Hong Kong, Taiwan and China to North America, Japan and Korea. The effect was delayed until businesses reopened Wednesday morning and discovered that they couldn't make international phone calls, open U.S. and other foreign websites or rely on their e-mail.

Ships from Singapore and the Philippines hurried to the scene of the breakdown Thursday to start repairs. The Hong Kong government says that fixing undersea cables typically takes five to seven days; but the work could be delayed this time by aftershocks and by quake damage to the seabed. Meantime, telecommunications operators scrambled to reroute phone traffic to working cables, some of them through Europe.

By Thursday afternoon, Hong Kong's Office of the Telecommunications Authority and phone company PCCW were reporting that phone service had been restored to just about everywhere except Taiwan. But many overseas websites remained unavailable and e-mail was unreliable. PCCW spokesman Hans Leung said that rerouting telecommunications traffic was only a temporary fix. "Over the longer term, we've got to get those cables working again," he said.

The meltdown exposed the strains put on Asia's telecommunications network by heavier Internet traffic, especially from websites such as YouTube "where users load thick, wide video files," BDA's Clark says.

At the same time, traditional telecommunications companies are losing business to new players such as the Internet phone service Skype; so they have less revenue to invest in the phone network. To save money, telecoms companies don't bury cables deep enough in the ground or the sea bed. Result: Fishermen plying the waters off eastern China's Shandong province frequently pull up fiber-optic cables in their nets. Farmers outside Beijing uproot cables despite signs warning them not to dig.

"So there will be a debate," Clark says. "Do governments need to step in to help guarantee operations for stock markets, hospitals, etc.? Do things need to operate differently?"

Help is already coming. Earlier this month, six telecommunications operators from China, the United States and South Korea formed a consortium to lay the first underwater fiber-optic cable directly linking China and the United States.

The new cable will be able to handle 62 million calls simultaneously — 60 times the capacity of the current network, which travels from China to the United States via Japan, according to the government-run, English language newspaper China Daily.

The new cable should be finished next year, just as the existing cable can no longer meet demand, Leng Rongquan, executive vice president of China Telecom told China Daily: "The Internet traffic between China and the U.S. is growing dramatically, which requires significant trans-Pacific capacity."

For now, businesses are scrambling to limit the damage. And some office workers were taking advantage of the downtime to enjoy long lunches, catch up on filing and chat with coworkers. "It's inconvenient, but there's nothing we can do," says Yolanda Fong, manager at a Hong Kong watch manufacturer.

"Our networks were completely down," says Neil Yue, merchandiser at New Crown, a Chinese shoemaker that supplies Payless Shoes and other U.S. companies. "We had no communication with our buyers in the States for one and a half days until our technician set up a backup network."

Bill Pike, managing director of trucking components manufacturer Sunbird Engineering in Hong Kong, set up his firm's outgoing e-mail messages to report back when they were opened. Otherwise, he says, "we don't know what's gone through and what hasn't." Pike also shifted his firm's e-mail to a more reliable server in southern China.

Like other managers in Asia, Pike is thankful the breakdown occurred during a holiday lull. But he is worried what will happen when business picks up after Jan. 1. "My big concern isn't this week," he says. "It's next week."

MacLeod reported from Beijing
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