Telecommunication News
- Asia back online after quakes, but access patchy
Date: 29-Dec-2006 Sources: (Shenzhen Daily)
TELECOMMUNICATIONS across Asia was slowly being restored Thursday after earthquakes off Taiwan damaged cables and knocked thousands offline, but access to foreign Web sites was still patchy.
China's major telecom operators China Telecom and China Netcom had launched emergency measures to improve access and repair the damaged cables, the Ministry of Information Industry said Thursday.
With satellites and other live lines, China Telecom resumed about 15 percent of its disrupted Internet connections, and expanded its international broadband traffic to 60 percent of the normal level as of 10 a.m. Thursday, the company said. But traffic to North America is still crowded, according to the company.
It would still take time to repair the damaged cables, because the number of damaged cables is 'unprecedented,' said China Telecom, which promised to increase its broadband speed to 10 to 15GB in the following days.
China Netcom announced Thursday noon that it had resumed 6 GB traffic between China and the United States, the route most seriously damaged by the earthquake. And telephone services to most countries had resumed as of 10 a.m. Thursday, a company spokesperson said.
Access to Yahoo and MSN was still very slow Thursday. An online survey by sina.com.cn showed that 48 percent of Internet users could not log on to foreign Web sites at 5 p.m. Thursday, and some 52.06 percent of the polled said the problem had caused them losses.
The quakes off Taiwan's southern coast damaged undersea cables, cutting off phone and Internet services Tuesday to parts of China, South Korea, Japan, Southeast Asia and the United States.
South Korea's top fixed-line and broadband operator KT Corp. said six submarine cables owned by a consortium of telecom firms had been disconnected Wednesday, knocking out thousands of telephone and broadband connections. The company restored most of the telephone services but broadband services for some clients remained unavailable Thursday.
KT and other regional operators have warned that fixing all of the affected cables could take at least a few weeks and are working to find ways to run the traffic through other live lines.
In Taiwan, some telephone services had been restored, although international access was shaky. Foreign exchange dealers said trading services were also back to normal.
Chia Boon Chong, spokesman at Singapore Telecommunications, Southeast Asia's top phone company also said services were progressively being restored.
Analysts said the disruption highlighted the fact that most of the region's cable networks were running in the same direction, along earthquake-prone geographic lines.
'People will start to say we can't let this happen again,' Frank Dzubeck, president of Washington D.C.-based telecom consultancy Communications Networks, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
'The issue here is parallelism, you've really got to have multiple paths. You can't lay all the cables in the same place.'
Dzubeck added that the Internet bust in 2001 had hit expensive plans by various companies to lay undersea cables along new paths that were less likely to be affected by earthquakes.
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