[IP] Asian Quake Disrupts Data Traffic (NY Times, 28 Dec 06)
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From: GLIGOR1@xxxxxxx
Date: December 28, 2006 5:33:24 AM EST
To: vint@xxxxxxxxxx, dave@xxxxxxxxxx, mslynn@xxxxxxx,
LLee23@xxxxxxxxx, Dennis.Jennings@xxxxxx, fuchs@xxxxxxxxxx,
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Subject: Asian Quake Disrupts Data Traffic (NY Times, 28 Dec 06)
December 28, 2006
Asian Quake Disrupts Data Traffic
By CHOE SANG-HUN and WAYNE ARNOLD
SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 27 — Telecommunications across Asia were
disrupted on Wednesday after an earthquake off Taiwan damaged
undersea cables, jamming Internet services as voice and data traffic
vied for space on smaller cables and slower satellite links.
The quake disrupted services in Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, South
Korea and Japan, but a ripple effect was felt in other parts of the
world. Many phone subscribers could not get through to Europe,
regional telecommunications operators reported, as they raced to
reroute their traffic to alternative lanes.
“We are seeing really massive outages in a spread of countries in
East and Southeast Asia,” said Todd Underwood, chief operations and
security officer at the Internet monitoring firm Renesys. “This is a
much broader effect than you see in most natural disasters.”
Financial companies and businesses in the region were hit hard, as
online banking and communications between financial markets and
traders were affected. The stock exchanges in Tokyo and Hong Kong
said they were working without problems, and traders found ways to
complete their transactions.
The earthquake, which Taiwan authorities said registered a magnitude
of 6.7, struck off the island’s southern tip Tuesday evening. Several
major cables were cut, according to telecommunications executives,
including the Asia Pacific Cable Network, which links North and
Southeast Asia, and the SEA-ME-WE-2 link, which stretches from South
Korea around the Eurasian land mass to the Netherlands.
Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan’s largest phone company, said that the quake
had damaged two undersea cables off the Taiwan coast. The lines route
calls and process Internet traffic for several Asian countries. China
Telecom, China’s biggest fixed-line telephone operator, said that the
earthquake had affected lines “from the Chinese mainland to places
including the Taiwan area, the United States and Europe, and many
have been cut.” It also reported serious damage to Internet connections.
PCCW, Hong Kong’s main fixed-line telecommunications provider, said
that several of its partly owned submarine cables had been damaged.
With its data capacity reduced by half, PCCW cautioned that some
Internet users in the region could experience congestion over the
next several days. Both Singapore Telecommunications, Southeast
Asia’s top phone company, and its local rival, StarHub, reported slow
access to Internet pages.
Mr. Underwood said that after the earthquake struck, 3,000 Asian
networks disappeared entirely from his company’s tracking equipment.
By comparison, 5,000 networks disappeared during the blackout of 2003
in the Northeast United States, he said.
Networks in the United States and Europe were not affected. However,
many companies with subsidiaries, partners or manufacturers in Asia
are finding their communications disrupted. “The reality is the
Internet is a global network, and it is fairly rare to find large
organizations that don’t do a significant amount of traffic to Asia,”
Mr. Underwood said.
Experts in Taiwan and elsewhere said that repairs to undersea cables
could take weeks, raising fears of more communications difficulties
in Taiwan, the fifth-largest economy in Asia, and of more telephone
and Internet problems in the region.
“This is a major event, and it’s not going to get fixed fast,” Mr.
Underwood said. “These cables are underwater. You have to get boats
in place, they have to drag the cables until they find the break. The
good news is that during earthquakes the breaks tend to happen close
to land and are not really that deep. But the last underwater cable
outage took six weeks to fix.”
Analysts said it was fortunate that the breakdown occurred during the
relatively quiet holiday period, with business activity light and
markets mostly quiet. Such an interruption during an ordinary week
could have had catastrophic impact on regional businesses, especially
financial markets.
Still, many securities traders in Hong Kong and Singapore were unable
to obtain prices and complete orders because networks linking
financial companies were disrupted. Dealers in the region said they
have had difficulties accessing international news providers for
information. They also reported that customers using the Internet for
prices complained that they could not look up stock prices online.
That Internet traffic out of Southeast Asia was not cut off entirely
was testimony to the progress made in recent years in adding capacity
along new routes, executives said. But they said that most
information sought by global Internet users remains in the United
States, and Asia is linked to that information by only a handful of
relatively fragile cables that are subject to forces on the ocean
floor. Information can be transmitted by satellite, but it is slower
and more expensive than sending it over cables.
“We do need these submarine cables,” said Paul Budde, an analyst in
Sydney. “Satellite is not really an alternative for the heavy
traffic. For the bulk, you do need these fat cables.”
But most of Asia is separated by water, meaning data must be carried
by undersea cables that rest on the seabed up to eight kilometers, or
five miles, below the surface. Building such submarine cables is an
expensive undertaking. By one estimate, it costs up to $500,000 a
kilometer to lay undersea cables. As a result, most cables are owned
by consortiums of telecommunications companies, which create joint
pricing and share the cost of building and repairing the cables.
As recently as a decade ago, Asia was connected to the United States
by only five cables, all through Japan. The dot-com boom ushered in a
period of rapid expansion, and cables now connect Australia, China
and South Korea directly to the United States.
In an attempt to add even more capacity to meet growing demand in
Asia, Verizon Communications announced last week that it was joining
with three Chinese carriers, a Taiwanese carrier and a South Korean
carrier to build the Trans-Pacific Express, a $500 million, 18,000-
kilometer network in the region.
That will help telecommunications companies in the future, but their
most immediate task is finding alternatives for delivering their
customers’ information until the undersea cables can be repaired.
KDDI, Japan’s major carrier for international calls, whose
communications along undersea cables out of Japan went through Taiwan
before reaching Southeast Asia and beyond, said that the use of
alternative lines would limit the possibility of a complete breakdown
in communications.
In Seoul, the KT Corporation, South Korea’s leading fixed-line and
broadband service provider, rerouted ordinary telephone calls and
data traffic, said Yeom Woo Jong, a KT spokesman.
“This incident reminds telecommunications companies like us of the
importance of acquiring alternative lines,” Mr. Yeom said, “to ensure
undisrupted services during an emergency. It means investment and
more cost.”
Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, South Korea, and Wayne Arnold from
Singapore. Brad Stone contributed reporting.
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