VARIOUS: Asia's telecommunications services are slowly being restored after earthquake off Taiwan cuts undersea cables.

Ships set sail on Friday, (December 29) to mend cables damaged by earthquakes off Taiwan that cut communication in Asia, while companies found new routes for data flows to prevent another disruption. Service was back to normal on the last business day of the year with telecoms companies securing new routes via land and satellite to restore communication -- ending outages that affected banks and brokerages from Seoul to Sydney. "As of now about 117 fixed-lines, which are used exclusively by companies, are damaged. 52 of damaged fixed-lines have been restored," said Hong Sung-young, South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication official. "Ordinary people would not feel uncomfortable now. Restoring through roundabout routes have been worked on. It will take 10 or 15 days to restore all damaged fixed-lines," Hong added. In the wake of the crisis, many were wondering how to keep communications flowing in a world where submarine cables are the lifeblood of telecommunications and where one glitch can cause global problems. Communications firms said it might be time to bolster an undersea network that was built during the telecoms boom of the late 1990s and seen little added to it since. Financial service companies said they would start the new year by tweaking their contingency plans with the lessons learned from the outage. In Taiwan some businesses were still finding difficult to cope with the disruption of their services, making communication with their clients very difficult. "Since the quake damaged the undersea cables, it has been very difficult to access some internet website which is causing us lots of problems to communicate with our clients," said Hsu Shou-Ming, who works at an information technology company in Taipei. The Office of Telecommunications Authority in Hong Kong, confirmed that six of the seven major optical fibre cables connecting to Japan, Korea, the US and Canada were damaged and will need at least five to seven days to repair. "The seven major submarine optical fiber cable systems running towards the Northeasterly direction that is towards the Taiwan area, has suffered damaged during the earthquakes. Right now, we are using the redundancy circuits in the direction towards the southwest, that is Singapore and Australia to restore all the services. All services are now functional, but because of the extent of the damage, inevitably there will be congestion over some routes, particularly for internet access," Au said. "The repair task is not a simple one, because they have to locate the fault; survey the condition on the sea bed; raise the damage cable to the water surface and do the joining and testing. We estimate that will take at less five to seven days to do the repair on some of the cables," Au added. The Communication Authority of Thailand, CAT Telecom, Thailand's Internet regulator and sole controller of the international gateway, said four of its eight optical networks had been affected by the Taiwan quake, causing its speed to drop by 70 percent. At CS Loxinfo, one of Thailand's major internet provider, more than 80 percent of its customers were affected by slow web services. "The capacity of Thailand is almost 100% of utilization, term of nationwide utilization capacity. So when you got hit, everybody got hit. 80-90% of the route goes through Taiwan, Japan, Korea and USA," said Anan Kaewruamvongs, Managing Director of CS Loxinfo. But he said that most of CS Loxinfo's clients knew the causes for the disruption and were more concerned about resolutions.

ITN Source | December 29, 2006

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