Engineering News
- Cable repair progress slow
Date: 17-Jan-2007 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
REPAIR of undersea communication cables damaged by the Dec. 26 earthquakes off Taiwan is making slow progress due to poor equipment and bad weather.
Workers couldn't apply any electrical technology or dispatch a robot, as the damaged cables are 4,000 meters underwater, said John Walters, general manager with Global Marine, one of the companies involved in the repair.
No single cable has been fully repaired till now, he said.
It will be a long time before Internet access is fully restored between Asia and the United States as workers are using 'technologies of the 19th century to solve problems of the 21st century,'Sina.com said yesterday.
Workers have had to adopt a method used in the 19th century to identify the location of the slender cables, whose diameter is about 21 centimeters, Walters said.
Global Marine has sent two repair ships to the Bashi Channel and the sea area off Luzon islands of the Philippines, along with another four from other rescue companies.
Each ship, 100 meters long, has around 60 crew members, who've been working on shifts round the clock.
However, the high winds over the channel brought waves of 10 to 12 meters in height, Walters said.
The repair work was expected to be completed by Jan. 30, said Taiwan-based Chunghwa Telecom in a previous report, another company involved in the repair.
China Telecom said in a previous report that 70 percent of its Internet services had been restored through alternate routes.
Overseas Internet access, especially between China and the United States, is now being transferred through other pathways such as satellite links, which are slow, expensive and unstable compared with cable-based connections.
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