The telco tsunami


WHEN an earthquake struck Taiwan at 10.26pm on Tuesday — the second anniversary of the deadly Asian tsunami — seismologists warned of giant waves hitting the Philippines.

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They were wrong, but the ripples have now spread across Asia. Web surfing has slowed to a crawl, leaving one of the world's most tech-savvy regions in a virtual blackout.

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The tremors cut Taiwan's external links for hours. And, when neighbouring countries including Singapore woke up yesterday morning, they felt the pain too. Internet connections to websites hosted overseas were painfully slow as the quakes had broken major undersea telecommunications cables — the fragile links that carry data between Asia and the rest of the world — on the southern tip of Taiwan.

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The damage was possibly greater than it was during the last serious incident in 1999.

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The three local telcos, all of whom are reliant on the affected cables for data and some voice traffic, gave assurances that they were diverting traffic to other networks while partners in Taiwan and Greater China repaired the cables. Only local websites enjoyed normal surfing speeds.

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Meanwhile, "because everyone is competing for the available bandwidth, there is congestion now on the remaining bandwidth", SingTel spokesman Chia Boon Chong told Today. MobileOne, which provides IDD call services, said yesterday evening that phone lines to Taiwan were also "heavily congested".

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Earlier in the day, calls from Singapore to Taiwan could not be connected at all, said a private banker who cannot execute any trades without verbal approval from her Taiwanese clients. Taipei-based Chunghwa Telecom, the country's largest phone operator, said the repairs could take two to three weeks while it progressively restored parts of the network.

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But Singapore's StarHub promised that normalcy here would return "after a few days". In the meantime, traffic would "only be slow at times to our subscribers" numbering 308,000 households, said spokeswoman Jeannie Ong. StarHub is also working to restore transmission of two digital cable television channels, Hallmark and TV5Monde.

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This is not the first time that a Taiwan quake has extensively damaged submarine cables. In 1999, tremors there broke the Asia Pacific Cable Network (APCN). It is the predecessor of the US$1-billion ($1.54-billion) APCN 2, one of the six networks currently affected and partly owned by Asian carriers including SingTel and StarHub. The irony is that when APCN 2 was launched in 2001, it was touted as the region's first cable system with a "self-healing function", said to be "capable of restoring itself instantly with its ring configuration when a failure occurs in a part of the system".

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What happened to the instant healing? "It seems that the quake has been so bad that there have been multiple breaks," said Mr Vignesa Moorthy, chief executive of ViewQwest, a company selling Internet access to businesses.

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Where there is physical damage, cable ships will have to send automated robotic arms to fix the breakage underwater. "It's not just a software problem. On the seabed, it's a tougher situation," telecoms analyst Victor Liu of research firm In-Stat told Today.

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The cables lie some 8km below the ocean's surface; each kilometre of cable costs up to an estimated US$500,000 to lay. APCN 2 alone stretches 19,000 km.

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While there is little that telcos can do to protect themselves against acts of nature, they can start building alternative networks, said Mr Bertrand Bidaud, vice-president at research firm Gartner.

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One potential route is the Asia-America Gateway Cable System, which bypasses earthquake-prone Taiwan. It "will avoid some of the areas most prone to seismic activity, conditions which are hazardous to undersea cables", the network's consortium of owners, including StarHub and Telekom Malaysia, said in a press release during its launch in June this year.

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But before the Asia-America system comes into service in 2008, cable networks remain vulnerable.

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Numbers told a bleak tale. According to Internet Traffic Report, a monitor of global Web data flow, Asia yesterday had the slowest Web connection with response time at 619 milliseconds, or triple the average 200 milliseconds. "This technological issue is aggravating already-thin liquidity," BNP Paribas' senior currency analyst Thio Chin Loo told Today.

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If normalcy does not return soon, companies cannot blame employees for feeling demoralised. Ms Sumeda Kaw, marketing manager of business process outsourcing service provider Aspirant Technologies, could not give a potential client a "live" Internet demonstration because of the disruption. After giving an impromptu verbal demo, a frustrated Ms Kaw was ready to call it a day. "When the connection gets like this, you just want to pack your bags and go home," she told Today.

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Those who play online games requiring high broadband speeds were equally glum. "If the connection lags and you're playing against other gamers, they will 'kill' you because you're reacting more slowly or retarding," said avid gamer May Soon.

Extracted from www.todayonline.com -------------------------------------------------

Looks like we have to bear the slow internet speed for awhile.