Chinese internet outage: no news would be great news

The International Herald Tribune broke the news a couple of days ago that the [tag]cable repairs[/tag] are going to take even longer than initially expected.

Repair of damaged cables in Asia to take longer than expected

By Jonathan Adams
Tuesday, January 16, 2007

TAIPEI Internet services across East Asia are still not functioning at full capacity three weeks after an earthquake near Taiwan damaged critical communication cables, and the authorities in Taiwan and Hong Kong said final repairs on the lines would be delayed by at least a month.

Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan, part of a consortium that owns four of the eight undersea cables that were cut during the earthquake on Dec. 26, said Tuesday that bad weather and rough seas had hampered repair efforts. The damage was also more extensive than initially thought, the company said, with its cables severed in at least 10 places. The company now estimates that the first cable will not be repaired until early next week, with the three others fixed by the end of the month.

The Hong Kong Telecommunications Authority said in a statement Monday that repairs on all the damaged cables would not be completed until the middle of February, weather conditions permitting. The original estimate for final repairs was mid-January. The earthquake, just off the southern coast of Taiwan, snapped cables carrying 90 percent of voice and data traffic in East and Southeast Asia.

Contractors for the cable consortium, which also includes SingTel, the dominant provider in Singapore, are still struggling to fix the cables, some of which lie 3.3 kilometers, or 2 miles, beneath the ocean surface. SingTel, Chunghwa and PCCW in Hong Kong said that they were able to quickly reroute nearly all traffic away from the damaged cables. But the alternative routes are circuitous, sometimes degrading the quality of voice traffic and slowing Internet speeds.

Chunghwa stressed that despite the repair delays, most services were back to normal. Hong Kong Internet services are operating at about 80 percent of normal efficiency. Hong Kong users report that Internet performance, especially when accessing or downloading material from Web sites based in North America, remains sluggish during peak periods.

But while most services continue uninterrupted, the digital breakdown has prompted new thinking on how to strengthen the region’s contacts with the rest of the world. “In order to deal with future disasters, we’re going to set up several contingency plans,” Chunghwa Telecom said. The firm says it will add extra satellite capacity for its voice communications, buy or lease additional cables as a backup for Internet traffic, and propose a joint “backup mechanism” for countries in the region.

Pretty crappy news, especially when you remember that we were initially told that everything would be working by mid-January. Well, today the China Daily brought China’s English-speaking newsreaders this gem of an article:

New quake thwarts undersea cable repairs
(Shanghai Daily)
Updated: 2007-01-19 16:29
Another earthquake off Taiwan has further hindered the repair work of the damaged undersea communication cables, extending the schedule by at least 15 days.
Workers found more damage to the thin cable lines after an earthquake measuring 5.2 on the Richter scale shook the sea around the island at 11:13am on Wednesday, Shanghai Securities News said today.

An official with Hong Kong’s Office of Telecommunications estimated that the first phase of repairs would be finished by end of this month.

“The remainder should be completed by mid-February, depending on the weather,” the official said.

Transport of the new cables will take at least four to five days as the cables have to be transferred through a third port before they reach Taiwan, which also prolongs the schedule, according to a communication operator on the island.

China Telecom and China Netcom, two major communication operators on the mainland, didn’t comment on the progress of the repair work, said the report.

An official with China Telecom told the newspaper yesterday that the company failed to fulfill its promise of the cables being mended by Wednesday.

However, “the mainland’s international fixed-line telecommunication services have been re-established and 70 percent of Internet services have been restored through alternate routes,” said an official with the Shanghai Telecom.

MSN China is negotiating with the mainland’s communication operators concerning the increase of its Internet access, to better improve its Windows Live services.

The IRIS Consortium‘s seismic activity tracking website shows that there was, in fact, another quake on Wednesday. So is the quake going to push the repairs back even more from the date the IHT article cites? An article from today’s Manichi Daily News quotes an Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT) spokesman as saying repairs will be done by the end of February…let’s hope that’s just doomsaying.
In [tag]Changchun[/tag] the internet certainly isn’t working at 70-80% capacity like either of the articles claim. Most American and European websites are unresponsive, there isn’t enough bandwidth to use Skype to call home, AIM won’t work, and there are still major issues with accessing GMail with any regularity. But on a positive note, the few websites that do work for me have started working much faster today. It’s a sign of progress.
[tags]china, internet, taiwan[/tags]