Repairs on Network Cables in Asia Could Take Days
By DONALD GREENLEES and WAYNE ARNOLD
The New York Times
HONG KONG, Dec. 28 — Several ships were on their way today to repair regional telecommunications cables broken by an earthquake off southern Taiwan, but officials warned that it could take several more days before Internet access across much of Asia returned to normal.
Communications companies and regulators in several countries said that fixed-line and mobile international telephone connections were largely back on line, two days after a quake with a magnitude of 6.7 struck the Luzon Strait, killing two people and causing property damage in Taiwan.
Hong Kong officials said six out of seven submarine cable systems of the regional network, accounting for 90 percent of telecommunications capacity of the region, had broken ”one by one” in the quake and its aftershocks.
The cables link countries in North and Southeast Asia to each other and to North America, and the disruption has underscored the vulnerability of the infrastructure that the fast-growing region depends on for normal commercial activity.
Banking services, particularly international transactions, were severely interrupted Wednesday, but banks across the region reported that services had resumed after networks were configured to make detours around the broken cables. Access to international transactions at automated teller machines continued to be affected in some places, and access to overseas Web sites was spotty.
Two cable maintenance ships from Singapore and the Philippines were headed to the site of the broken cables, and three more were due to depart soon, the Hong Kong telecommunications authority said.
Once they are there, it could take five to seven days to carry out repairs.
A technician in Singapore with knowledge of the situation said that the speed of the repair work would depend on how quickly the crews could find the severed ends of the cables, some of which have suffered several breaks.
While undersea cables are occasionally damaged by ship anchors or fishing nets, repairing them after an earthquake is likely to be much more complicated, he said. The severed ends could have been buried by deep-sea landslides or washed several kilometers from their positions on the seabed, said the technician, who asked not to be identified because his company was not authorized by its partners to speak about the issue.
Most phone companies were able to restore international voice calls Thursday by rerouting traffic to satellites and cables unaffected by the earthquake.
Officials of Taiwan’s biggest telecommunications company, Chunghwa Telecom, said that they had restored 80 percent of telephone service and 95 percent of Internet service by today, The Associated Press reported from Taipei.
Hong Kong’s biggest telecommunications carrier, PCCW, also brought international telephone service back to normal. But a spokesman said that Internet data capacity was “still congested.”
NTT Communications, the biggest Japanese carrier, said that services on 87 percent of its damaged corporate data lines resumed today, Bloomberg News reported.
But the financial impact of the outage has been limited by the fact that many executives and traders are still away for the holidays. Markets were quiet and trading light. The outage seemed largely to enforce the lull that typically takes over Asia each year.
“Business has dried up in the past week anyway, so there’s not a lot of things people are doing anyway,” said Joel Kim, a fund manager for ING Investment Management in Hong Kong.
No Sang Chil, a currency dealer at Kookmin Bank of South Korea, said that his office had resorted to the telephone to conduct currency transactions until this afternoon, when the Reuters information service came back up.
“That was possible partly because this time of the year is a slow season in currency dealings,” he said.
It remained unclear just how business would be affected next week when vacationers begin returning to their offices and commerce starts to pick back up.
“It’s something that will affect trading volume and might even exacerbate price actions,” said Joseph Tan, an economist at Standard Chartered in Singapore. “Because we don’t have all the speed to the market, you don’t have all the liquidity.”
BT, the British telecommunications operator, said that its voice and Internet services in Taiwan and parts of China had been largely restored as of early today, after being disabled for about 24 hours after the quake hit. “At one stage, we couldn’t get any calls into Taiwan, and there was severe congestion on lines to Beijing and Shanghai,” said Leslie King, a BT spokesman in London.
Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Brunei and Western Union said that service on two of the seven Asian cable lines it used had been disrupted by the quake and that “isolated” money-transfer agents inCambodia had been affected.
DHL, the global logistics company, returned to normal operations after its telecommunications providers rerouted its communications, said Anil Talwar, DHL’s vice president for services management in Singapore. DHL backs up its data in Malaysia, the Czech Republic and the United States, but the troubles this week highlighted yet another risk.
While businesses typically think that having two service providers protects them, he said, “The question is: ‘If both of the links go down, what will you do?’ ”
Donald Greenlees reported from Hong Kong, and Wayne Arnold from Singapore. Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul, and Nicola Clark from Paris.
Communications companies and regulators in several countries said that fixed-line and mobile international telephone connections were largely back on line, two days after a quake with a magnitude of 6.7 struck the Luzon Strait, killing two people and causing property damage in Taiwan.
Hong Kong officials said six out of seven submarine cable systems of the regional network, accounting for 90 percent of telecommunications capacity of the region, had broken ”one by one” in the quake and its aftershocks.
The cables link countries in North and Southeast Asia to each other and to North America, and the disruption has underscored the vulnerability of the infrastructure that the fast-growing region depends on for normal commercial activity.
Banking services, particularly international transactions, were severely interrupted Wednesday, but banks across the region reported that services had resumed after networks were configured to make detours around the broken cables. Access to international transactions at automated teller machines continued to be affected in some places, and access to overseas Web sites was spotty.
Two cable maintenance ships from Singapore and the Philippines were headed to the site of the broken cables, and three more were due to depart soon, the Hong Kong telecommunications authority said.
Once they are there, it could take five to seven days to carry out repairs.
A technician in Singapore with knowledge of the situation said that the speed of the repair work would depend on how quickly the crews could find the severed ends of the cables, some of which have suffered several breaks.
While undersea cables are occasionally damaged by ship anchors or fishing nets, repairing them after an earthquake is likely to be much more complicated, he said. The severed ends could have been buried by deep-sea landslides or washed several kilometers from their positions on the seabed, said the technician, who asked not to be identified because his company was not authorized by its partners to speak about the issue.
Most phone companies were able to restore international voice calls Thursday by rerouting traffic to satellites and cables unaffected by the earthquake.
Officials of Taiwan’s biggest telecommunications company, Chunghwa Telecom, said that they had restored 80 percent of telephone service and 95 percent of Internet service by today, The Associated Press reported from Taipei.
Hong Kong’s biggest telecommunications carrier, PCCW, also brought international telephone service back to normal. But a spokesman said that Internet data capacity was “still congested.”
NTT Communications, the biggest Japanese carrier, said that services on 87 percent of its damaged corporate data lines resumed today, Bloomberg News reported.
But the financial impact of the outage has been limited by the fact that many executives and traders are still away for the holidays. Markets were quiet and trading light. The outage seemed largely to enforce the lull that typically takes over Asia each year.
“Business has dried up in the past week anyway, so there’s not a lot of things people are doing anyway,” said Joel Kim, a fund manager for ING Investment Management in Hong Kong.
No Sang Chil, a currency dealer at Kookmin Bank of South Korea, said that his office had resorted to the telephone to conduct currency transactions until this afternoon, when the Reuters information service came back up.
“That was possible partly because this time of the year is a slow season in currency dealings,” he said.
It remained unclear just how business would be affected next week when vacationers begin returning to their offices and commerce starts to pick back up.
“It’s something that will affect trading volume and might even exacerbate price actions,” said Joseph Tan, an economist at Standard Chartered in Singapore. “Because we don’t have all the speed to the market, you don’t have all the liquidity.”
BT, the British telecommunications operator, said that its voice and Internet services in Taiwan and parts of China had been largely restored as of early today, after being disabled for about 24 hours after the quake hit. “At one stage, we couldn’t get any calls into Taiwan, and there was severe congestion on lines to Beijing and Shanghai,” said Leslie King, a BT spokesman in London.
Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Brunei and Western Union said that service on two of the seven Asian cable lines it used had been disrupted by the quake and that “isolated” money-transfer agents inCambodia had been affected.
DHL, the global logistics company, returned to normal operations after its telecommunications providers rerouted its communications, said Anil Talwar, DHL’s vice president for services management in Singapore. DHL backs up its data in Malaysia, the Czech Republic and the United States, but the troubles this week highlighted yet another risk.
While businesses typically think that having two service providers protects them, he said, “The question is: ‘If both of the links go down, what will you do?’ ”
Donald Greenlees reported from Hong Kong, and Wayne Arnold from Singapore. Choe Sang-Hun contributed reporting from Seoul, and Nicola Clark from Paris.
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