Internet Down in Asia Pacific After Earthquakes in Taiwan
It’s hard to imagine that an relatively tame earthquake in term of casualty in Taiwan can cause major disruption to Internet and telecommunications services in countries around Asia Pacific. The main quake, at magnitude 6.7 for Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau measurement and at magnitude 7.1 if measured by the US Geological Survey, struck off Taiwan’s southern coast at 8:26 PM local time on Tuesday, killing two people. The disruption has caused slowing and crawling Internet surfing traffic, with intermittent access downtime, and international circuit congestion.
According to Reuters, at least 6 fibre-optic submarine cable systems out of Taiwan in Asia that connects between East Asia region and Southeast Asia region had been cut and knocked out by the quakes. The undersea cables outages affect not only Taiwan itself, but the unable to surf Internet and VoIP down problem has also been experience across Asia Pacific in countries such as Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Indonesia and Philippines, where Internet users unable to access to websites located in United States (US) and unable to connect to login to instant messengers such as Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger, and voice call facing all circuits is busy problem.
Various fixed-line, Internet and broadband service providers (ISPs) are working round the clock for traffic diversion, re-routing traffic and restoration works, which may takes 2 to 3 weeks, according to Bloomberg. However, it’s still weird and hard to understand why major telecommunications traffic has been dependent on cables around Taiwan, an earthquake prone area, and without any fall back or parallel redundancy links that can be used in short notice during emergency.
Related Articles
- Free 2GB USB Flash Stick With Every .Asia Domain Name
- Unlimited Free Calling to US, UK, Canada, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Australia with MediaRingTalk.com
- Intel Announced New Series of Atom Processors During Taiwan Computex
- Apple’s Unlocked 3G iPhones Launching in Taiwan
- FarEasTone Offers Intel Atom-based MID at $57 to Boost Sales in Taiwan Market
- Broadcom Unveils Next Generation Media Module Targeted for UMPC and MID During Taiwan Computex
- Intel Showcased Moorestown MID Prototype During Taiwan IDF
- Get Some Interesting Findings from Akamai’s State of the Internet Report
- How to Uninstall and Remove Trend Micro Internet Security Pro and (PC-Cillin) Internet Security 2005/2006/2007/2008 Manually
- AOL VoIP Internet Phone Review by USA Today
Entries (RSS)
January 8th, 2007 00:24
[...] As pointed out on mydigitallife it’s still weird and hard to understand why major telecommunications traffic has been dependent on cables around Taiwan, an earthquake prone area, and without any fall back or parallel redundancy links that can be used in short notice during emergency. I hope the telecom companies will learn some lessons from the weaknesses exposed in the system by the natural disaster and focus more on alternative routes and back up systems. [...]